• Logicalis Launches Power7 Cloud for IBM i and AIX

  April 18, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Logicalis launched its new Power7-based cloud offering last month, providing IBM Power Systems shops and ISVs another avenue for running IBM i and AIX applications. The vendor, which has its US headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan, says the usage-based pricing of its new Enterprise Power Cloud platform will help customers scale-up processing power without large capital expenditures. Logicalis Group is a large reseller of Power, X64, and storage gear from IBM that’s based in the U.K. and brings in more than $1 billion in revenue each year. While the company, which is a unit of the South African company Datatec

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Cover Story

  April 18, 2011 Hesh Wiener

  This is a story about online retailing giant Amazon and its tactful handling of a product problem. The product in this story is the Kindle 3 e-book reader. Kindle is the emblematic delivery device for a growing range of goods and services, Amazon’s direct connection to somewhere between five and 10 million customers. So, when the latest Kindle began failing in mysterious ways, there was a lot more at risk than a batch of gadgets. At stake was Amazon’s relationship to some of its best customers; it has emerged stronger than ever. Let’s all learn a little from Amazon.

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• ERP Survey Leads to Oracle’s Answers

  April 18, 2011 Dan Burger

  The results of corporate-funded surveys are as predictable as finding donut crumbs in the conference room after RPG development team meeting. These surveys are designed to give the appearance of independent authority, but they rarely mask the built-in bias. In this case, I think Oracle is propping up its marketing efforts with a survey report that reveals what we already agree with while adding support for exactly what it wants to sell. If you have software upgrade worries, read this survey warily. Just last week, Oracle was chirping about a survey of more than 400 enterprise application managers that confirms

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• IBM Replaces the HMC with New Systems Director Console

  April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is putting the Hypervisor Mangling Controller, er the Hardware Management Console for managing the PowerVM hypervisor for Power Systems out to pasture. The device, which was launched with the Power5-based servers way back in 2004, is a glorified and expensive PC or rack server that runs Linux and the microcode that controls PowerVM and other aspects of the hardware system. The idea with the HMC is to get the management of the hypervisor off the machines that it manages. Earlier incarnations of logical partitioning for OS/400 were what is called a type 2 hypervisor, or a hosted one,

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• Reader Feedback on As I See It: Shared Sacrifice

  April 18, 2011 Hi Victor,

  Your April 11 article, As I See It: Shared Sacrifice, is mind boggling. I’d love to send excerpts to my congressional delegation and governor. I don’t want to plagiarize, so what is the appropriate way to quote your article quoting others? By the way, CVS is one of the few large corporations headquartered here in Rhode Island. –Ed Hi Ed, The fair use provisions of the copyright law say you can quote a few items, but why not just email your politicians a paragraph of your own and then a link to Victor’s story? –TPM Victor: I always enjoy

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• IBM Offers Red Hat Linux on a Per-Server Basis on Power

  April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat have come together to provide Enterprise Linux 6 on IBM’s Power Systems sold by Big Blue and with first- and second-level support provided by Big Blue. That’s nothing new, of course. IBM has been a big OEM partner of Red Hat’s for years, and my back-of-the-envelope math is that RHEL drives somewhere on the order of $1.4 billion of IBM server hardware sales a year these days across X64, Power, and mainframe platforms. What is new in announcement letter 211-114 is that IBM and Red Hat have cooked up a per-server license price

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• IBM and ISV Partnerships: What’s In It For Us?

  April 18, 2011 Dan Burger

  The relationship between IBM and the independent software vendors is built on mutual success. But where might that lead in terms of overall success and the health of the platform? It can mean a lot. As a case in point, let’s take a look at New Generation Software, maker of business intelligence software for IBM i shops. Toward the end of 2010 NGS stepped up the IBM business partner ladder from the Advanced Partner rung to the Premier Partner position, a significant change in status. IBM has a point system that allows ISVs, for example, to progress in what

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• IBM Offers Freebie Slices on Shiny New SmartCloud

  April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM announced its first public cloud for running X64 applications, the Smart Business Cloud, or SmartCloud for short. The company also laid out its plans for fluffing up portions of the SmartCloud that would be based on Power Systems and support AIX or Linux applications and–eventually–IBM i workloads. What Big Blue didn’t say as part of its announcements is that it had created a special promotion giving prospective customers slices of that cloud to play with for free. In announcement letter 311-048, IBM launched the Smart Business Cloud Spring 2011 promotion, offering customers a piece of the

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• A View of a View of a View

  April 13, 2011 Ted Holt

  One of the traits of a good database is that users are not forced to perceive the structure of the data as it is stored in the tables, but are free to perceive the data in ways that are meaningful to them. Today I share an SQL technique that achieves that goal. (No, you can’t do this with logical files.) Alternate Reality Before I illustrate the technique, let’s be sure we understand this idea of allowing the user to perceive the data as he wants to. Suppose a table (physical file) of invoices includes the date that an invoice is

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• SQL Bar Charts

  April 13, 2011 Hey, Ted

  A while back I had a problem that appears to be quite common, but just rare enough that it’s a little challenging when it hits you. Often in our roles as database administrators we need to determine various figures, such as how many key values in a table are used up in case we need to extend the field. Or sometimes we just to provide a statistical representation of data. What I needed was to produce a histogram using SQL. Let’s say you have an array of sample statistics and you want to break them into groups of an arbitrary

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