• Free Tool from Nastel Identifies MQ Performance Problems

  September 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Nastel Technologies recently announced MQSonar, a free tool designed to detect possible performance problems in IBM MQ environments. Nastel is giving away MQSonar with the hopes that it will entice users to step up to its full IBM MQ monitoring and management product, Autopilot, which is used by some of the biggest financial services and healthcare firms with MQ running across mainframe, IBM i, and distributed platforms. MQSonar works by sending “pings” out across a WebSphere MQ environment and measuring how long it takes to come back. Just as real SONAR in the open ocean can help determine the size,

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• State Tax Collector Modernizes iSeries System, Wins Award

  September 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Instead of ripping out its customized iSeries systems and installing a brand new pre-packaged system to the tune of about $40 million, the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (DRA) elected to modernize its existing iSeries infrastructure, using integration and business intelligence tools from Information Builders. In addition to saving tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, the implementation won an award. The DRA is a critical component of government operations in the state of New Hampshire. The agency collects about $1.4 billion annually from 253 state municipalities, and is responsible for overseeing the statewide property tax system

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• Orati Systems Debuts With a Lineup of IBM i Tools

  September 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There’s a new player in the market for IBM i utilities. Orati Systems, a British software consultancy and developer, is rolling out a series of tools for the midrange server, including a spool file converter called SpoolMagic and a file transfer tool called iSFTPpro. The company has also written a bunch of open source products that it will distribute free of charge, including a PDF generator called iPDF that promises to be popular. SpoolMagic is an IBM i utility that converts *SCS spool files into other formats, including HTML, TXT, CSV, XLS, XML, physical files, standard and enhanced PDF,

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• IBM Offers Freebie SmartCloud Slices–Again

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue really, really, really wants you to try out its SmartCloud public cloud, and to try to get you hooked on the idea of IBM managing your infrastructure for you, the company is giving away freebie slices on the SmartCloud in various geographies. The promotion is running on IBM’s website, and has been spotted in recent weeks in various announcement letters in smaller geographies. And it is the SmartCloud Enterprise variant with 64-bit and 32-bit X86 processors, which have been virtualized and can be set up to run Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Red Hat Enterprise

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• Gartner Says Public Clouds Puffing Faster Than Expected

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The public cloud is huffing and puffing itself up and is trying to blow the IT distribution business down. According to a new projection from Gartner, the myriad kinds of public cloudy services available on the market today will account for $109 billion worldwide. That is up 19.6 percent from 2011’s global public cloud revenues, and higher than the 12 percent growth Gartner was forecasting in prior prognostications. “The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” explained Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be

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• Oracle Still Struggling With Systems, But Hanging In There

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t know the meaning of the word regret, and despite the shrinking systems business in the wake of the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.6 billion in January 2010, Ellison and Company are determined to make a real systems business out of this. And to their credit, they are doing a better job than Sun was doing by itself. In Oracle’s first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in August, the company posted revenues of $8.18 billion, down 2 percent and shy of Wall Street expectations. But thanks to cost controls, Oracle brought just

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• Put Your Data Center Feeds Into The Flex System TCO Tool

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to figure out the pros and cons of moving to a new server, on both the technical and economic fronts, is difficult enough. Trying to assess the cost and benefits of moving to a new system architecture is even more complex. But that is what IBM wants customers to do in making the leap from Power Systems and System x boxes to “Project Troy” Pure Systems modular machines. That’s why IBM has gone back to partner Alinean to gin up a return-on-investment and first-pass capacity planning tool to help you figure out how to convert your Power and X86

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• Reader Feedback On Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hi, Tim: Looking at the iSeries 515 option you mentioned in Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well? Don’t forget that unless it has V7R1 with it, you have an after-license fee and a year’s Software Maintenance to buy to get it to V7R1. The existing system can be used as a donor to transfer across licensed programs, but if it has Software Maintenance then it can get to V7R1 for just the hardware cost. If the maintenance is about to expire then order the upgrade before it does! –Richard P.S. 515s are good boxes;

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• Top CIOs Bring Home The Bacon, IT Salaries Flat As Pancakes

  September 24, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Corrected: With the prices of gas, food, and energy all on the rise, an annual salary with six zeros in it could take a lot of pressure off the average American. It sounds outrageous, but that’s the range for the top chief information officers at some big corporations. The top salaries from 2011, the last year for which data is available, were recently revealed by Janco, a management consulting firm that monitors the IT job market. While the annual salaries on the list of the top CIO earners would be like winning the lottery for those of us toiling

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• As I See It: Legacy

  September 24, 2012 Victor Rozek

  It was shaping up to be a near-perfect day, except for that not-so-small matter of the dead horse. It began as the big finish to a busy summer; a trip to the Wallowas (Oregon’s mini-version of the Swiss Alps) to visit a friend and, ostensibly, to spend a little time in the mountains. Personally, I love mountains with a yearning that borders on the irrational, and I hadn’t had my fill of the high country this year, so I was eager and impatient to hit the trail. The morning after we arrived, I stood outside in the crisp early-autumn air,

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