• 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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• Applications Misfire When Database Integrity Ignored

  September 24, 2012 Dan Burger

  By the time the cow is out of the barn, it’s too late to close the door. For many companies, including those in the IBM midrange community, applications that have served well for many years with patches and fixes are needing attention just like that barn door. The choice between proactive and reactive problem solving is one way of looking at the situation. The choice between application-centric development and data-centric development also awaits. Just about every IBM i shop is engaged in application-centric development, which is both good and bad. Application development is the engine that drives business and can

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• Python On IBM i: Why?

  September 24, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Why might you want to run Python on the IBM i platform? According to the folks at iSeries Python who manage the port of the open source language to IBM i, Python is so readable and easy to learn that it gives programmers a big boost in productivity when they use it, particularly for reporting purposes. And with the recent completion of the port of the Django framework to IBM i, there is one more reason to consider adding Python to your quiver. The iSeries Python project, which is the brainchild of Per Gummedal, began around 2004. Since then, Gummedal

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• Power7+ Systems Due To Launch October 3

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ladies and gentlemen, start your checkbooks. We’ve been telling you all about the impending Power7+ processors and speculating on the related servers for so long you probably think they are already here and can’t figure out why they aren’t available from IBM‘s business partner channel. It looks like we won’t have to wait much longer to see what Big Blue is going to do to ratchet up its assault on Oracle and Hewlett-Packard in the RISC/Unix racket while preserving its IBM i platform and keeping the X86 legions at bay. It’s a delicate bit of maneuvering that IBM has

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• Admin Alert: Eternal Users: A Common Problem With IBM i Batch Jobs

  September 19, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Many IBM i shops have problems with eternal users. Eternal users are user profiles previously used by former IBM i power users that are still on the system. Although these users have left your organization, you can’t delete their user profiles, because the profiles are used in IBM i functions used to run batch jobs. This week, let’s look at eternal users and how to weed them out of your system. How The Gotcha Gets Ya Eternal users happen when administrators use their own or other power user profiles for submitting batch work to the system. Batch jobs are frequently

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• OSHA Changes To IBM Battery Handling Affect Cache Battery Replacement

  September 19, 2012 Hey, Joe

  I’m scheduling cache battery replacement for my production machine. Since this machine is never off-line, do you have any best practices or recommendations for how to change these batteries while production is running? –Ben Due to a recent United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) change, changing the cache batteries on your IBM i partitions isn’t as easy as it used to be, especially on a production machine. Here’s what happened. IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide disk drive caching. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will

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