• Newsflash: Developers Hate to Test Their Software

  June 21, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are some things that transcend platform differences. All computers wait at the same speed. All projects come in over budget and beyond their projected windows. Sometimes people change things for the sake of change and for no damned good other reason. And, according to a recent survey, application software developers hate to test their code. So why not do what the computers do best and automate the testing? Well, because programmers are artists as much as they are techies, and they all have their own ways of writing code and therefore their own methods for testing code. What’s an

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• Two Top i Concerns and a Bunch of Little Ones

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our colleagues at COMMON Europe will this week present the first pass on their annual Top Concerns survey, which the IBM midrange user group has put together for the past five years to help steer Big Blue’s marketing and development of machines running the i and predecessor operating systems and their RPG language and integrated database. I have no doubt that many users will give IBM some good advice on what it needs to do. As an advocate for i shops, I have two toppers of my own and a bunch of little ones that I would like to toss

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• IBM Puts More Power7 Iron Through the Java Test Paces

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in March, in the wake of the initial Power7-based server announcements from IBM that came out in early February, I walked you through the available benchmarks for the new Power 750 midrange box running the SAP data warehousing benchmark and the SPECjbb2005 benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. Since that time, IBM has launched Power7-based blade servers and done tests on the larger Power 770 and 780 machines to show their Java performance on the SPECjbb2005 workload. Because there is less gaming in the SPECjbb2005 Java application benchmark (or so it looks like from my armchair software

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• Open Source EGL Means an RPG Generator Is Possible

  June 14, 2010 Alex Woodie

  IBM wants to take Enterprise Generation Language open source. Last week at its Rational user conference in Florida, the vendor submitted a proposal to the Eclipse consortium that would place the bulk of EGL–a high-level language intended for Power Systems and mainframe shops that generates Java, JavaScript, and COBOL code–into the public realm. In addition to expanding the EGL customer base, IBM hopes the move will result in the creation of new add-on tools, such as code generators for RPG and .NET. Under the proposal submitted last week, which you can read here on the Eclipse Web site, IBM

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Market Cap and Propeller Beanies

  June 14, 2010 Hesh Wiener

  Lately, users of iSeries, System i, and Power Systems machines might wish their servers came from Apple, a company more famous than IBM for i stuff such as iPads, iPhones, iPods, iMacs. At least that’s how investors see things. At the beginning of June, Apple’s market capitalization was nearly $234 billion; IBM’s market cap was slightly over $160 billion, about a third less. The companies may be quite different, but in at least one way their computers are similar: IBM’s i and Apple’s Mac are both firmware cuckoos, the former hatched in a Power nest, the latter raised in

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• Which Way to HA? Hardware, Software, or Both?

  June 14, 2010 Dan Burger

  The availability of data and applications is hyper-critical for many organizations. Therefore, the decisions that are made when architecting a HA strategy become hyper-critical as well. The goal of minimizing downtime to the skinniest possible margin is the challenge for the top global corporations, but the pathways to reaching recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are being closely watched by all companies concerned with business process management. In the IBM Power Systems community, this is particularly interesting. “The business requirements come down to RPO and RTO,” says Ron Peterson, senior product strategist at Vision Solutions. Peterson

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• Server and Storage Array Sales Rebound in Q1, Says Gartner

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After a dismal late 2008 and early 2009, the server and storage arrays markets are starting to perk up a bit in the first quarter, according to the box counters at Gartner. It may take years to climb out of the hole in hardware spending that the Great Recession created, but at least the global economy seems to be getting up off the ground and moving forward. Gartner’s server gurus estimate that in the first quarter of 2010, worldwide server revenues rose by 6 percent, to $10.75 billion, and server shipments were up an astounding 23 percent, to 2.12

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• IBM Cuts Memory Conversion/Activation Prices on Older Power 570s

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Clearly some big Power Systems customers are not quite yet ready to let go of i5/OS V5R4 and AIX 5.3, something I surmise by the fact that IBM last week chopped memory prices on its older iron. Yup, you heard that right. Only a few weeks ago, as The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM had to tweak some upgrade prices for customers moving from Power 570 to Power 770 and 780 boxes, lowering the price of converting DDR2 memory activations on the Power 570 when they are converted to DDR3 memory blocks on the new Power7-based Power 770 and

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• Activist Investor Icahn Puts the Squeeze on Lawson Software

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes money to make money, so they say, and if you have enough money, you can apparently make people let you take their money or their company. That, in essence, is what grumpy corporate raiders activist investors like Carl Icahn do for a living. They find companies that are not doing as well as they could be, buy up stock, push their way onto boards, sell off assets or whatever it takes to drive up the stock, and then sell their shares and leave with a bigger pile of cash to go make trouble somewhere else. Lawson Software,

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• IBM Launches Application Runtime Expert for i

  June 14, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 was an application box from the get-go, and system administrators and end users on the box think of it at the application level, not as a collection of components with their own performance specs and attributes. But, when you are trying to deliver a certain level of performance, as consistently as possible, to end users, then you have to get down into the weeds of the individual performance of hardware and software components of the system. This is not the kind of thing that SMB shops are particularly good at, and nor should they have to be. This

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