Monthly Archives: February 2012

After yesterday’s post where I pointed to an article that encouraged people to migrate their IBM i machines to Windows or Linux in the cloud and let your hosting company do all the work, including system maintenance, I started thinking about times in my professional career where things went wrong because the vendor or an executive over promised and couldn’t deliver. Here’s two cautionary tales I’ve run into when migrating to a new system, and things didn’t quite work out as promised.

One time, we migrated a production application from a z-series machine to an AS/400 (as it was known then). After migration, we discovered two things: Continue reading →

IT Jungle just published a new tip I wrote about using QFileSvr.400 to make a connection between two IBM i machines and how to troubleshoot that connection when you’re having problems.

If you’re not familiar, here’s my definition of QFileSvr.400 in 50 words or less:

“The QFileSvr.400 file system is a unique IBM i machine construct. It allows one IBM i machine (IBM Power i, System i, and iSeries hardware running the i, i5/OS, or OS/400 operating system) to access AS/400 IFS files on another IBM i machine…. Continue reading →

Bob Cancilla, a familiar face in the IBM i world, has an interesting column (provocative for IBM i personnel) on his Web site, encouraging readers to drop their IBM i boxes and move to a cloud-based solution. Here’s one of his relevant points.

The total cost of cloud based operations is a fraction of what you will pay in terms of hardware, software, and people to maintain and support your own Power Systems IBM i based environment

There was a linkedin topic that reports that going rate for an IBM i system administrator is $90k per year plus in most parts of the United States. So figure about $120k total cost. That is a lot of money for any company, but especially smaller companies with small IBM i based machines! This is a totally unnecessary expense in a cloud based environment.

I’ll offer a guest blog post on joehertvik.com/ to anyone who wants to rebut Mr. Cancilla.

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Agan, from Tim Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle this morning: “Last week, in announcement letter 312-020, IBM pulled the plug on a pretty generous IBM i discount deal, and it is not clear how much the removal of this deal … Continue reading →

From Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle:

Anyway, the word on the street is that Big Blue is crafting another Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.1 and is fixing to have it come to market sometime around April or May. Sources familiar with IBM’s plans were not any more specific than that, and this may be due to the fact that IBM itself may at this point not be sure of the schedule.

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Once again, I’m mining the nearly ten years of Admin Alert columns I’ve written for IT Jungle on IBM i administration (thanks TPM). In this series, I like to present several articles I wrote over time that demonstrate a certain technique or a long-range project.

This week I’m looking back at 2010-2011 when my compadre Master Technician Scott and I installed two new Power i 720 machines for one of our clients. Here’s a list of articles I wrote that followed our progress as these machines went in. Hopefully, these pieces can help you the next time you’re installing a Power 7 machine. Continue reading →