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The Power Systems Catalog Gets Skinnier

October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As has been happening for the past several months, IBM has once again been warning customers that features for its Power Systems and their System i and System p predecessors are going to be removed from the Big Blue product catalog. Last week the axe fell on a bunch of features, and the company also mothballed a bunch of System x servers and features that are probably important to i shops. IBM also put some Ultrium tape cartridges back into the catalog after withdrawing them in May.

According to announcement letter 909-217, January 4, 2010, will be the last

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Reader Feedback on Moore’s Law and the Performance Wall

October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, in talking about the future Power7-based servers from IBM, as I have been doing for the past several weeks, I brought up the idea that IT managers and programmers had better start thinking about how multicore and multithreaded chips with a lot more cores and a lot more threads might impact their applications. I received a thoughtful letter from a long-time i programmer, which gave me–and therefore you–some food for thought.

Hey, TPM:

The whole threads thing concerning RPG is bogus. Before one starts questioning RPG’s performance with multi-threading, one should ask what the need for

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Ballmer Dishes on Big Blue; Why Should Ellison Have All the Fun?

October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, it was Oracle‘s chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, explaining how he wanted to buy Sun Microsystems to be the platform company of the 21st century as IBM was back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. And now we have Microsoft‘s CEO, Steve Ballmer, bashing Big Blue for its profit-obsessed business strategy.

Yes, we have woken up, once again, in BizarroWorld.

In an interview with the New York Times, Ballmer basically called IBM a chicken, one that ditches businesses that it helped create–networking, memory chips, disk drives, PCs, printers–in an obsessive desire to squeeze profits

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IBM Deals on Blade Chassis, Tivoli Provisioning Manager

October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are looking to move from rack servers to blade servers, or to automate the provisioning and patching of your servers, IBM has some deals for you.

In the first deal, which is described in announcement letter 309-568, Big Blue is giving customers who have non-IBM blade servers a free BladeCenter S or BladeCenter H chassis for every non-IBM chassis they throw out, and customers wanting to move from non-IBM rack servers to BladeCenter blade servers can get a free BladeCenter S or H chassis for every nine rack servers they unplug.

The BladeCenter S chassis, which is

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Notes/Domino 8.5.1 Dances with the iPhone

October 12, 2009 Dan Burger

As it paves the road to full-time connectivity for the workforce, IBM‘s Lotus division last week rolled out the latest editions to its unified communications and collaboration tool box. Grabbing the headlines is . . . the Apple iPhone.

Ooops! This was an IBM announcement, wasn’t it? Sorry, the iPhone gets top billing wherever it goes. So the news is that Domino 8.5.1 and the Lotus Notes Traveler mobile device now have native support for the iPhone. For Notes folks, that means your email, your calendar events, and your contacts–those things most dear to you–will also be near to

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Much Ado About IBM’s Mainframe Monopoly; Once Again, the i Is Overlooked

October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The business and trade press was all beside itself late last week as it came to light that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened up an investigation of IBM‘s monopolistic practices with regard to the mainframe market. While it is always a welcome sight to see the DoJ at least interested in making sure monopoly power is not abused, it is a little late for someone interested in fostering an alternative mainframe market. (Well, maybe.) And as usual, no one is thinking about the even tighter grip that Big Blue has on an even larger–and more economically powerless–group

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Getting Started with RDi’s Application Diagram, Part 1: Source Call Diagram

October 7, 2009 Susan Gantner

RDi’s Application Diagram tool has some features that developers may find very useful, but initially finding your way around with the tool isn’t always easy. For that matter, many developers have never even noticed that the feature exists. So in this tip, I’ll take a look at how to get started using the Application Diagram.

If you ever used CODE (a.k.a., CODE/400) in the past, you may be familiar with a feature of that pre-RSE toolset called Navigator. I didn’t use Navigator very often, but when I needed it, it saved me a lot of time. The basic idea of

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Passing an Entire Result Set as a Parameter: Part 1

October 7, 2009 Hey, Mike

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

We are moving from green screen to PC GUI screens and have come across a need to have the “reverse” of returning a result set. We need to be able to pass a stored procedure of one or more rows (i.e., a result set) in a single call. We could have a single table, but more than one user will be sending data at the same time. It’s a heavily used green screen that we will be replacing. The green screen itself is an input capable sub-file. It

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Admin Alert: The Great CBU Survey and More

October 7, 2009 Joe Hertvik

Let’s change it up a bit this week. First, I’m initiating the Admin Alert Great CBU Survey where I’m asking to collect information from users and vendors who work with Capacity BackUp (CBU) systems. Then I’ll follow-up on and add a little more information to some previous articles I posted. That’s a lot of information to cover in 1,200 words or less, so let’s get started.

Chapter 1: The Great CBU Survey

After reading Part 1 and Part 2 of my columns on performing live CBU switch tests on a System i box, reader Don K emailed me the following

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No Longer an IBM Partner, Randr Navigates the Open Source Track

October 6, 2009 Alex Woodie

You don’t need an expert economist to see that the AS/400 midrange market is not what it used to be. A once thriving market, it’s now maybe a tenth of its previous size, and more resellers and software vendors leave every day. One of the former IBM AS/400 business partners that has evolved its business plan to suit the times is Randr, Inc., which has made a clean break with the traditional midrange, and moved to open source software.

While Randr made its final break with IBM last month, when it was removed from the rolls of the IBM

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