• IBM Tweaks European Power Systems Trade-In Deal

  December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, IBM cooked up a trade-in rebate deal for Power Systems customers that gave them cash if they moved to a new machine and turned in an old one. That deal has been extended and tweaked several times as the year progressed–six times to be precise–after an update on November 21. In announcement letter ENUSZA13-1003, IBM made it possible to upgrade some installed Power7-based systems to Power7+ machines as part of the deal. The deal was tweaked back in April so only Power7+ buyers could get the rebates, dropping Power7 machines from the list of eligible machines

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• Wanted: The Enterprise Data Center Of The Future

  December 2, 2013 Dan Burger

  There are periodic leaps of progress in the IT business and some don’t even require leaps of faith. It has been 25 years since IBM introduced the AS/400 midrange computer and there are many companies now running the AS/400 successor, IBM i, that have refused, with good reason, to leap into the X86 alternate universe. How will the data center landscape change in the coming years? The IT analysts at Gartner pay little, if any, attention to the IBM i user base, but they are predicting great leaps of progress in data center architectures. Advice for planning data center strategies

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• IBM i ERP Vendor Modernizes For Success

  December 2, 2013 Dan Burger

  The IBM i software vendors are one of the big reasons this platform, which is built around business applications, has enjoyed 25 years of greatness. The majority of these vendors are much more oriented on the midmarket than the enterprise, which happens to be where the greatest number of IBM i users do what they do. One of those vendors is VAI, the ERP software company with a healthy customer base of midsize manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. As 2013 draws to a close, VAI is on course to close out the year with an annual growth rate in the

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• Reader Feedback Regarding The Shadow Of Database Hype

  December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hey, Dan: I must disagree with the quote that it was not until V7R1 that the AS/400 had “in-memory database.” We have been using the SETOBJACC command for many, many years to lock commonly used table files and work files into memory to improve performance. The trick is to create a separate subsystem/memory pool that has no job queues to route actual jobs into the same memory paging space. It takes a surprisingly small amount of memory to achieve dramatic I/O savings on these files. For the work files, be sure to create them with deleted records, and set them

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• Better Worldwide IT Spending Ahead, Predicts IDC

  December 2, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  In the United States, the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday by retailers, marks the beginning of a spending frenzy as the year winds down and people begin to panic about getting ready for the holidays. It is the last chance for retailers to grab those consumer dollars and hopefully end the year with cash in the till. The IT market has been in desperate need of a cash influx in 2013 as overall tech spending is on course to increase by 4 percent this year at constant currency, reaching $2.04 trillion, but down from last year’s growth of 5

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• As I See It: Poisoning The Well

  December 2, 2013 Victor Rozek

  A long time ago, I was in an elevator with five or six other people when the power died and the box hung suspended between floors. There were a few gasps of shock and moans of annoyance, and more than one profanity hurled at the vicissitudes of fate so bold as to interfere with our individual designs. But after our protestations fell on fate’s indifferent ears, we gradually lapsed into an uneasy silence. It was very dark and very quiet, and amid the growing anxiety it felt like we were dangling in a group coffin. One woman in particular was

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• Roping The Wind: Power7+ In The Texas SMB

  December 2, 2013 Dan Burger

  The last time I checked in with Doug Fulmer it was March and the IBM Power7+ machines were just getting into the market. Interest in the Power7+ boxes wasn’t exactly lighting any fires in the small to midsize market down in Texas, where Fulmer works for the value-added reseller (VAR) KS2 Technologies, and Fulmer wasn’t inclined to think that Power7+ was going to be a game changer. But then the wind started to pick up. In the past nine months, there has been a bit of a sales spurt for the small VAR that specializes in helping small IBM

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• Power Chips To Get A GPU Boost Through Nvidia Partnership

  December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What is old is new again. The AS/400 and its progeny are well acquainted with the concept of coprocessors–adjunct computing elements that hang off the central processor to help the collective do more work. Using graphics processors is all the rage in the high end of supercomputing these days, and now IBM will be working with GPU maker Nvidia to marry its Tesla GPU coprocessors to future Power processors. It is not entirely clear how this will help IBM i shops, but there are some intriguing possibilities. If there is one rule in the computer business, it is that products

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• Open Source Is Here To Stay On IBM i

  December 2, 2013 Alex Woodie

  For years, open source software has been a bit of a redheaded stepchild in the button-down IBM midrange community. IBM i shops were hesitant to use it, and vendors were afraid to adopt it. But with so much of the computing world now running on open source, the aversion to open source has gradually melted away, and it has steadily crept into use among large corporations, and the IBM i world too. It is tough to measure the adoption of open source software, which flows freely across networks by its very nature. Nobody requires you to register to use open

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• Minimizing IPL Surprises With The IPL Startup Kit

  November 20, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Unlike a Windows server that can be rebooted several times a year, an IBM i machine is so reliable that it can run for a year or more without being IPLed. But infrequent IPLs can cause their own problems, as functions that should be restarted after an IPL may not necessarily actually restart after an IPL. That’s where it comes in handy to have an IPL startup kit available. Why Create An IPL Startup Kit? Since an IBM i box can go so long between restarts, your system startup routine may not include all the functions that were added to

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