2012 - Page 33 of 88

IBM Rounds Out Flex Systems With Xeon E5 Iron

August 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue added new machines to the Flex System lineup last week, but don’t get too excited. They were not Power7-based machines, or better still Power7+ nodes, but just X86-based nodes for the “Project Troy” modular system that the company debuted in April that are based on the latest Xeon E5 processors for two-socket and four-socket servers that were announced in May by Intel.

The Xeon E5-2600s are geared down versions of the Xeon E5-2600s that came out in March, sporting one fewer QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) link between the processor sockets and therefore lower memory capacity and bandwidth between

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Reader Feedback On Big Blue Gives A Solid Installed Base Number

August 13, 2012 Hey, TPM

I wonder how, or if, IBM counts the thousands of used servers that have been removed from the original account, but are still working perfectly for smaller companies. These are often running vertical application software supported by IBM partners (or not). Perhaps half of our customer base is now operating on used Model 520s due to IBM’s pricing structure for new System i servers. Most don’t keep an IBM hardware maintenance contract.

Obviously these customers don’t matter much to IBM (they barely care about entry level sales of new servers). But they are still an active part of the ecosystem.

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Go To Where The IT Jobs Are

August 13, 2012 Dan Burger

All things considered in the job market, most employers prefer to recruit locally rather than considering people from out of town or out of the region. And most people searching for work would prefer a local job rather than one that requires relocation. But when the local well runs dry, you need to look for places where opportunity is likely to knock.

According to the latest news from the career-minded folks at Dice, IT folks fishing for jobs will have better luck finding honey holes in the technology-fueled economies of California, Virginia, Texas, New York, and Florida. If you

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As I See It: The Other Motivator

August 13, 2012 Victor Rozek

With the Olympics having just concluded, a number of third-tier events will again fade into quadrennial oblivion. Sports like synchronized swimming, skeet shooting, and beach volleyball (in which scantly clad women frolic in the icy British rain) got their 15 minutes of exposure, if not fame, and will now be consigned to the devotions of small bands of loyalists. One such sport, parochially known as ping pong, has been upgraded to the more sober-sounding table tennis by serious practitioners who have transformed a basement pastime to a form of quick-twitch warfare.

I was curious about the sport because of a

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IDC Says Power Systems Trumps X86 In Resiliency

August 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

Productivity losses due to unexpected downtime were six times higher in X86 environments than Power Systems environments says a study by IDC. The study, which was commissioned by IBM and turned into a white paper that was recently posted to the IBM website, found that the cost of IT staff responses to downtime was 10 times more in the X86 environments than it was in IBM Power Systems environments.

In recent months, IBM has posted a slew of new white papers on its website that highlight the server platform and its competitive advantages. In addition to the 13-page white

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Windows Replaced By IBM i, Hosted Software, And Web Portal

August 13, 2012 Dan Burger

Getting something for free sounds good until you discover that it’s worth pretty much what you paid for it. In this case, Windows-based Web applications are delivered as a free hosted service. Some of the users would pay to have a better alternative. And that’s where Nathan Andelin steps in. Andelin writes applications in RPG and hosts them on an IBM Power Systems 720 running IBM i. And he’s found customers who will give up their free option for something better.

Even though the hosted service Andelin offers has a fee, that is not a deterrent. It’s a matter of

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Power7+ Chips Juiced With Faster Clocks, Memory Compression

August 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I have my ticket booked to head west to the Hot Chips 24 conference hosted by Stanford University, where IBM, Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel are expected to talk about just announced and impending processors. But Big Blue seems unable to contain its enthusiasm for the Power7+ chip that it will talk about alongside its next-generation zNext processors for its System z mainframes.

A little more than a month ago, I told you about some of the details on the forthcoming chip that could be scrounged from poking around the Intertubes. From a die shot of

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BCD Tweaks IBM i Development Tool

August 8, 2012 Dan Burger

There’s nothing wrong with the green screen, but you better ask the people who use those applications if they believe that or not. While the old school display kicks butt in plenty of modern organizations from banking to manufacturing and from Omaha to Okinawa, there are bazillions of 5250 apps that need to be converted and brand new Web apps that need to be written. WebSmart ILE is one of the tools for doing that, and Business Computer Design, Intl. (BCD) has just updated that tool.

Developers have been using WebSmart ILE to produce CGI-based Web applications since 2001, and

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Admin Alert: The Right Way To Delete User Profiles, Part 2

August 8, 2012 Joe Hertvik

Last issue, I introduced a two-part article discussing techniques for deleting user profiles. Part one focused on prepping a user profile for deletion. In part two this week, I discuss how to determine whether the user is a critical user and what to do about it, and I demonstrate three techniques for deleting users. After reading both articles, you will have a good template for creating an IBM i user deletion procedure in your organization.

The Five Steps Of User Deletion

Last issue, I introduced a template that determined the best way to deal with terminated IBM i users

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Composing An XML Document From Relational Data, Part 1

August 8, 2012 Hey, Mike

My boss asked me if I know of a cheap or free tool that can automatically export a DB2 (for i) table to an XML file. I told him that I could write a Java program pretty easily that could accomplish this for a specific table, but I’m not aware of any way to “generically” do it for any table.

For example:

select *
  from deleteme

TheKey   SomeText
     1   Row Number 1
     2   Row Number 2

That code should produce output something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<deleteme>
 <row>
   <TheKey>1</TheKey>
   <SomeText>Row Number 1</SomeText>
 </row>
 <row>
   <TheKey>2</TheKey>
   <SomeText>Row Number 2</SomeText>

…

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