• IBM Offers PureFlex Power-X86 Deal Down Under

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rack is the new blade server chassis, in case you haven’t noticed. Big Blue launched the PureFlex systems in April, and it wants these machines to do battle against the converged systems stacks that Cisco Systems, Dell, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have put into the field. Some companies are so used to having multiple vendors providing servers, storage, and networking that the idea of buying them all from one vendor, and making such a commitment to a single platform, is a little bit scary. (Not so much for System/36, System/38, AS/400, and Power Systems shops, of course.)

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• Dell Hires Former STG CTO As It Launches Active System 800 Integrated Iron

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few months ago, I got a tip that Jai Menon, the chief technology officer for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, had left Big Blue and was preparing to take a high-level job at Dell. People at the enterprise groups at both IBM and Dell refused to comment on it, and so did Menon when I tried to contact him over the Intertubes, and so I waited for the inevitable announcement. It came last week as Dell launched an integrated, converged system called the Active System 800. Yes, the AS 800. Dell has put together a

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• Single Sign-On: Then and Now

  October 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  When single sign-on was integrated into the IBM OS/400 operating system in 2002, it was one of the highlighted technologies in the V5R2 release. In the right hands, it allowed system administrators in IBM midrange shops to set up user authentication beyond the boundaries of the i5 system to include multiple servers and applications–Microsoft Windows, Unix, Linux, and others–but primarily the target was Windows, where PC5250 emulators were the bull’s eye. There was widespread use of green-screen applications with emulators running those applications from a menu. Ten years later, why is single sign-on so rarely used? The benefit of

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• As I See It: Sub-Atomic Dreams

  October 22, 2012 Victor Rozek

  Theoretical physicist Brian Greene once observed: “No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you’re going to fail.” God knows I’ve tried, but my cat is just not interested in relativity. That’s so yesterday. She wants to learn quantum mechanics. But the thing about quantum mechanics is that only a handful of people on the planet can truly claim to understand it. And that’s probably an exaggeration. Even Einstein called it “spooky.” Not only is the math beyond the capabilities of the average smartphone, but concepts like “superposition,” “entanglement,” and “decoherence” have about as much in

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• Help/Systems Buys CCSS For Systems Management Expertise

  October 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Help/Systems last week bought CCSS, the developer of systems monitoring and performance management tools for the IBM i server. Minnesota-based Help/Systems plans to keep all CCSS employees and its offices in North Carolina, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and run the company as a completely separate entity, representatives with CCSS and Help/Systems say. Ray Wright founded CCSS and built it into a successful business developing, selling, and supporting IBM i systems monitoring and management tools. The company’s three products–QSystem Monitor, QMessage Monitor, and QRemote Control–help companies and cloud service firms run their IBM i servers in a more efficient

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• Tough Slogging In Q3 For IBM, Like Everyone Else

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is always bragging about how good it is to have annuity-like businesses that pay out, month after month, and in discussing the company’s results for the third quarter last week, the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Loughridge, reminded everyone that more than half of IBM’s sales and about 60 percent of its profits come from these areas, which include mainframe software licenses and services contracts. That other half of the revenue stream can be tough, and that other 40 percent of the profits is not a given, as the financial results for the quarter in September showed. As happened

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• PowerVM, IBM i Enhancements Mean Better Power Systems Clouds

  October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re still chewing through the October 3 Power Systems announcements from IBM, and this week we will drill down into some of the cloud-related tweaks that Big Blue made to the IBM i operating system with the Technology Refresh 5 update as well as in the PowerVM hypervisor and System Director VMControl tools that comprise the server virtualization underpinnings of a Power-based cloud–whether or not you use IBM’s SmartCloud Entry control freak to orchestrate that cloud. We told you all about the update to SmartCloud Entry V2.4, which finally supports the IBM i operating system, in last week’s issue

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• Database Modernization: A Matter of Survival for IBM i ISVs

  October 18, 2012 Alex Woodie

  In the discussion of database modernization, the question inevitably comes up: What are IBM i independent software vendors (ISVs) doing to modernize their databases? The answer, according to database modernization experts at Databorough, Resolution Software, and TEMBO, is they aren’t doing much. The vast majority of IBM i ISVs continue to use traditional DDS and ISAM database technology and aren’t moving quickly to modern SQL and DDL. Eventually the ISVs will need to invest in database modernization if they want to keep the applications relevant in an SQL world. Database modernization has been on the technology docket

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• Admin Alert: One Year Out–Preparing For Your Next IBM i Upgrade, Part 2

  October 17, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Two years ago, I wrote an article on how to start planning for an IBM Power i upgrade a year in advance. In that piece, I covered business partner evaluation, extended maintenance, third-party software, and budgeting for performance. Today I’m revisiting the topic and adding other hardware upgrade issues that require longer term planning and may need almost a year to complete. A Lot Of Ground To Cover In no particular order, here are the Power i hardware upgrade items that you can start planning for a year in advance of a hardware upgrade. Business partner evaluation–Evaluating your relationship

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• Non-Equal (Theta) Joins

  October 17, 2012 Ted Holt

  In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, all animals were declared to be equal. However, that was not the case. By the end of the book, some were “more equal than others.” You might think that all joins are equal, but you would be wrong. Unequal joins have their applications, too. The equijoin is the norm in business. A customer number in a table (file) of invoices matches (equals) a customer number in a customer master table. But it is also possible to join on non-matching conditions such as not equal, greater than, less than, greater than or equal to,

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