• IBM Extends And Tweaks Power Systems Deal In Europe

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has made a number of tweaks to a long-running deal that has been effect on Power Systems iron in Europe. Actually, it made a bunch of tweaks in the past several months, but they were just not obvious to us here at The Four Hundred up here in the Big Apple. (That would be me alone. Ah-hem.) In announcement letter ENUSZA12-1003, you can see all of the changes in the 2012 Power Trade In Program, which was extended to run until December 31 of this year back in July when the PowerLinux 7R2 machine was added

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• A BI On IBM i Partnership Blooms

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  Executives love the idea of business intelligence. The promise is that it can quickly provide dividends, but that rarely happens. Why is that? In IBM midrange shops, the situation is no different than anywhere else. IT departments are understaffed and overworked. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when new projects are added someone has to have the time to implement them. The path to completed projects is often paved by service companies. The recent partnership between Coglin Mill and GEMKO is a good example. Coglin Mill is has an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool called RODIN for

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• IBM To Charge For Lapsed Hardware Maintenance

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years now, IBM has charged a maintenance after license fee if you have a bit of its software that you have let fall off Software Maintenance. This after license fee is basically back maintenance that IBM thinks it is entitled to because you didn’t help pay for the support costs for a period of time, but now you want all of the cumulative benefits of Software Maintenance again. Now, IBM is going to do a similar thing with hardware maintenance, and it is called a “reestablishment fee,” hyphen not included. As you can see in announcement letter 612-042

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• Excepting X86 Iron, Server Sales Continue To Slip In Q3

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might be better for all parties concerned in the server racket if they didn’t stagger their new processor releases over the course of a year. But server processors are an increasingly complex thing to develop, the fabrication plants that make them are increasingly more expensive, and vendors have to slow down, get it right, and milk each chip generation for all it is worth. When the economy is running a little cool and chip makers are all in the middle of processor transitions, it is generally not going to cause server sales to go up. The late summer and

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• As I See It: How IT Decided The Election

  December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek

  In retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner. The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides

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• Mobile Developers Battle Complexity, Deployment Time

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  It is a simple and irreversible fact that application development teams are consumed by mobile computing. Smartphones and tablets have put the pressure on companies in the IBM midrange community (users of IBM i on Power Systems, i5/OS on iSeries, and OS/400 on AS/400s), where it is not far-fetched to say 50 percent are still dependent on the green-screen interface. A reluctance to convert at least some of their applications to a graphical interface is coming around to haunt them. Meanwhile, there are businesses, particularly start-ups, that recognize the power of the graphical user interface and that the need to

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• IBM Adds IBM i Support To Traveler And Kills Lotus Name

  December 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Great news for IBM i shops: IBM will enable Traveler, the email and messaging server for mobile devices, to run on the IBM i operating system as part of the forthcoming Notes/Domino version 9.0 platform, the company has announced. Big Blue also said that, with the launch of Notes/Domino 9.0 Social Edition in the first quarter of 2013, it will no longer use the Lotus name, marking the end of the 20-year-old, sunny yellow brand. IBM takes a tremendous amount of flack for its seemingly endless re-branding exercises, and at least some of it is well deserved. IBM’s marketers did

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• Power Systems Cloud Builders Get Huge Discounts

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is good news for Power Systems shops who are looking to move some of their IBM i and AIX applications out to the cloud or use cloudy capacity managed by a third party for disaster recovery. First, Big Blue is licensing both IBM i and AIX under special terms to managed service providers, or MSPs as they are called. And second, IBM has just launched a special utility pricing deal for MSPs that gives them deep discounts as they build out their initial Power-based clouds. Both moves will go a long way toward lowering the initial capital expenditures that

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• Admin Alert: Strategically Using Power Systems’ Processor Trial Capacity On Demand

  November 28, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  IBM Power system customers usually buy more capacity than they need. A customer may buy an eight processor Power 720 machine but only activate five processors, leaving the additional processors for future growth. Because it’s expensive to activate Power system processors, IBM offers a program called Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) that allows you to test whether additional processors will alleviate system bottlenecks before you purchase. What Is TCoD? Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) is an IBM program that allows you to activate already existing system processors for 30 days at no charge. The intent is to allow users to

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• Glenn Wants To Know More Facts About Special Values

  November 28, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I found your article 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values very interesting. I have a few questions related to a command I am writing. –Glenn I owe Glenn an apology. He is one of the many people whose email I never responded to. I’m sorry, Glenn. Sometimes life presents too many opportunities. Here’s Glenn’s first question: 1. If a user specifies *ALL for a parameter, how do you prevent the user from typing in other values? Fair enough. Define *ALL in the Single Value (SNGVAL) keyword, not in the Special Value (SPCVAL) keyword. CMD PROMPT('Do it') PARM KWD(RPTTYPE)

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