• Avnet Systems Biz Is A Little Soft In Fiscal Q3

  May 6, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first three months of 2013 were choppy for a lot of IT suppliers and distributors, and the situation was no different for master electronics components and IT distributor Avnet. The box pusher saw a bit of a budget flush in the fourth quarter of 2012, which was the second quarter of its fiscal 2013 year, but no such luck this time around with the U.S. government unsure of what it is going to spend once we get put beyond September this year and general skittishness in China and parts of Europe. In the quarter ended March 30, Avnet’s

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• The IBM i 500

  May 6, 2013 Dan Burger

  What can an electronic data interchange (EDI) software company tell you about the IBM i installed base? EXTOL International has 500 IBM midrange shops using its software that range from $25 million a year small to midsize businesses up to $21 billion a year enterprises. Each year it adds about two dozen new customers running its software on IBM i on Power Systems. EXTOL’s software does not run exclusively on IBM i, but the platform is an important aspect of the company’s business. Electronic data interchange allows the computer systems and networks of business partners to transfer data–typically related to

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• COMMON Europe Opens Up 2013 Top Concerns Survey

  May 6, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a bone to pick with IBM or just a helpful suggestion on how it might improve the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating systems, now is your chance to do something about it. For the past seven years, COMMON Europe has done its part to poll the IBM i user base and try to figure out what they are worried about. And now the eighth annual Top Concerns survey is open for you to speak your mind and help shape the future of this platform upon which we all make our livings. (Or at least

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• SAN Sightings At IBM i Shops On The Rise

  May 6, 2013 Dan Burger

  The idea of using a storage area network to increase storage capacity utilization has not exactly set the IBM i world on fire, but stringing together multiple servers and consolidating the storage space of each is finding its way into more IBM midrange shops than you might realize. I recently spoke with a couple of storage experts who believe SAN awareness is on the rise. The first is Ed Ahl, director of IBM business for Tributary Systems, a developer of storage virtualization software for IBM i and mainframe environments. The second is Tom Grigoleit, systems engineer at Meridian Group

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Think Or Quit

  May 6, 2013 Hesh Wiener

  Ginni Rometty has to think or quit. And I don’t expect her to quit. IBM‘s revenue peaked in 2011, the year Rometty became the company’s president, replacing Sam Palmisano. While she wasn’t the boss when Big Blue’s all defining policies were put into place, Rometty had been a top executive since 2009 and an IBM employee since 1991. So, while only recently at the tiller, she could hardly be surprised at the company’s course. It is doubtful, however, that she anticipated the consequences of IBM’s strategic decisions, including her own, or the harshness of the prolonged economic winter. Now

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• Systems And Strategy Execs Switch Roles At Big Blue

  May 6, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ginni Rometty is not cleaning house after a particularly unprofitable–and surprisingly so–first quarter for its Systems and Technology Group. But just after The Four Hundred went on hiatus at the end of April, IBM‘s CEO and chairman announced that she was swapping the roles of two executives who are long familiar to the OS/400 and IBM i community. The executives who are swapping desks are Rod Adkins, who has been running Systems and Technology Group for the past couple of years, and Tom Rosamilia, who used to work for Adkins as general manager of the System z business and

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• Infor Exudes Total Confidence At Annual User Confab

  May 6, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Infor let its customers and competitors know that it means business at the Inforum 2013 conference in Orlando, Florida. At the show, the privately held company highlighted its impressive growth, demonstrated the new products it shipped since last year’s show, and set a high bar with a new line of offerings that ranges from the new consumer-grade SoHo user interface and Twitter-like Ming.le feed, to new cloud offerings with IBM and Amazon‘s RedShift, and another IBM i product acquisition, just for good measure. On the stage at the Inforum 2013 opening session on April 23, the Infor brain trust

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• IBM Launches Extended Support For i5/OS V5R4

  May 6, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Not only is i5/OS V5R4 a rugged operating system in terms of its stability and reliability, but it is also one of the most long-lived operating systems in the history of computing. While regular Software Maintenance (SWMA) support for V5R4 expires on September 30 this year, IBM has, as promised, announced an extended SWMA support offering for V5R4 for customers who cannot, for whatever reason, get onto a newer IBM i 6.1 or 7.1 release by the end of September. In announcement letter 613-004, IBM introduced Service Extension for i5/OS V5R4, offers Software Maintenance support starting on October 1,

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• Admin Alert: Six Things To Do Before Switching Production Processing To Your CBU

  May 1, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Switching production processing to an IBM i Capacity BackUp (CBU) system involves more than just running the High Availability (HA) software commands that initiate the switch. It also involves preparing your source and target machines to switch places, so that data is correctly replicated and you can confidently run production processing on your CBU. Today, I’ll describe six steps you can take to ensure a smooth CBU switch over. Setting The Stage This article lists out tasks you should consider adding to your HA run book to produce the best results when switching production processing to an IBM i CBU

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• Odds and Ends

  May 1, 2013 Ted Holt

  It’s been awhile since we had an issue of odds and ends. Today seems like a good day for it. I hope you find something of benefit here. Hey, Ted: I tried to use the sed command in a CL program to replace [ with [n (newline). I tried many ways to get it to work. I finally gave up and used tr to translate from [ to n. I was really hoping to keep the bracket. When running Qshell commands in a CL procedure, how can you force a continuation line for a sed command? How can you insert

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