• Mad Dog 21/21: That’ll Teach ‘Em

  March 2, 2009 Hesh Wiener

  It’s difficult to sell an IBM i server to a prospect who worries that the talent required to use the machine will be in short supply, and even more so to sell an AS/400 or System i shop a new Power System that requires fresh skills. Students have X64 machines and so, usually, do their schools. Power? What’s that? IBM is trying to educate the educators by making access to Power technology cheaper for schools and by supporting faculty members, researchers, and students. And it has a big educational shindig coming up in September. As part of its effort to

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• Healthcare and Utilities Lead Vertical Markets in IT Spending

  March 2, 2009 Dan Burger

  In a year when IT spending is being nipped, trimmed, and sometimes lopped, it’s refreshing to hear about additional funds finding their way into corporate planning. For a peek at that silver lining, we are thankful to the forecasters at Gartner, who last week released a report detailing IT spending by vertical markets. Two industries claimed a place in the sun: healthcare and utilities. Not that it’s all that sunny in the forecast, but Gartner’s prediction is that IT expenditures in healthcare will grow 2.2 percent and utilities will invest at a slightly higher rate, which is pegged at

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• Reader Feedback on Colonizing Endicott and As I See It: A Novel Idea

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In my rant last week about Colonizing Endicott, I forgot the most obvious thing to suggest if IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman didn’t take me up on the opportunity to visit Big Blue’s stomping grounds and take some responsibility for the economic carnage that the absence of IBM in that upstate New York region has created. Send Sam himself to India or China! My thanks to the reader below for suggesting that in feedback. Let’s go one further, just as a thought experiment. What if we took the entire executive team in Armonk and the marketing

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• A Little More Color on Power Systems i Sales in Q4

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you don’t tell people what’s going on, they will often just assume the worst. Especially these days, as the global economy is undergoing some intense changes. But sometimes, that is a wrong assumption, and as I have said in the past year, I think IBM‘s i platform business is not doing as badly as many people might assume from the numbers Big Blue has been putting out. Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for the Power Systems division, used to run the Linux-on-Power efforts and then AIX and Linux marketing in the formerly independent System p

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• Warning: IBM Says Some SATA Disks Are Going to Sleep

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a BladeCenter blade server or a System x tower or rack server in your shop sitting alongside your AS/400, iSeries, or System i machinery, listen up. IBM is warning customers that SATA drives made by Seagate Technology and sold by Big Blue are, in very rare cases, going to sleep and not waking back up. IBM has posted a note in its disk subsystem support pages that explains what machinery could be affected. The short of it is that after power cycling a server or a storage array using the SATA drives, the drive refuses to spin

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• Dataram Hit by the Economic Downturn, But Ready to Do Biz

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  John Freeman, the president and chief executive officer at clone memory maker Dataram, sure picked a tough time to come on board when he took the helm last May. Almost immediately, the economy went on the rocks, but Dataram, which makes relatively inexpensive memory for lots of different servers (including IBM’s System i, System p, and Power Systems iron) is hanging in there despite the tough economy. For the fiscal third quarter ended January 31, Dataram reported sales of $5.64 million, down 15.6 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. Even though the company trimmed back engineering costs, research and

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• New IBM i-Related Redbooks, and a Bunch More in the Works

  March 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past few weeks, IBM and the team of techies who put together its Redbooks, Redpapers, and Technotes have updated two relevant i technical documents and are cooking up an important one that all i shops should keep their eyes out for later this year. The IBM BladeCenter JS12 and JS22 Implementation Guide, SG24-7655-00, is a good starting point for your nightly reading if you want to install i 6.1 AIX, or Linux on IBM’s JS12 or JS22 Power6-based blade servers. This blade guide, which came out on December 29 last year, was updated with new information

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• A Bevy of BIFs: %SCAN and %CHECK

  February 25, 2009 Jon Paris

  From recent questions on Internet lists, and from one-on-one discussions with RPG programmers, it seems that many are confused about the usage and operation of a number of built-in functions (BIFs). In particular the BIFs %XLATE, %REPLACE, %SCAN, and %CHECK seem to cause a lot of confusion. In this tip, I focus on %CHECK and %SCAN. I’ll look at the other misunderstood pair, XLATE and REPLACE, in a future tip. The %SCAN BIF has been with us since V3R7, when it was introduced along with %EDITC and %EDITW, to improve string handling. %CHECK, on the other hand, is a relative

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• Easily Avoid a Common Data Structure Error

  February 25, 2009 Ted Holt

  A shop with which I’m acquainted had an undesirable experience recently. A program that, to my understanding, had been working properly, ended abnormally. The error could have easily been avoided, had the programmer followed one simple rule of thumb. Take a look at the following program fragment. D MyData ds D OneField 4a D TwoField 7p 0 D RedField 3s 0 D BlueField 5u 0 D D Number s 15p 5 /free Number = TwoField; If the calculation is the first executable statement in the program, what is the new value of Number? The answer is that Number never gets

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• Admin Alert: Robot/SCHEDULE’s DST Work-Around and More

  February 25, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  Rather than cover one topic this week, let’s look at three issues that recently crept into my in-box. I’ll explain some additional work you may need to perform to keep Help/Systems’ Robot/SCHEDULE software running fat and happy during Daylight Saving Time changes; go over my updated list of i5/OS system monitoring tools; and expand on what type of post-upgrade backups you should perform after an i5/OS software upgrade. Another Daylight Savings Problem To Worry About United States Daylight Savings Time (DST) begins this year on March 8, 2009. Believe it or not, it’s only been since i5/OS V5R3 that IBM

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