February, 2009

Is it COMMON for System i’ers to run 5K?

Hat tip to David Vasta, who pointed me to the site of the COMMON 5k charity walk/run, which will take place during COMMON’s annual meeting in Reno in April.

Proceeds from the COMMON Cares charity run will go toward the COMMON Education Foundation and a local Reno charity to be named later. Here’s a good summary of the event:

This run/walk is for everyone - whether you’re a seasoned runner, an early-riser, trying to get back into shape, or attending COMMON for the first time and just want to make new friends, consider taking part in this first-ever 5K charity race.

With the numerous sessions, Exposition activities, and networking events on the agenda, finding the time to exercise will be challenging. In addition to starting out the conference feeling energized, you will be supporting two wonderful charities.

It’s always good to try to get some exercise in, even if you’re traveling. Just ask these mainframers who went for a jog at SHARE.

And if you’re just not into exercising, maybe you could just donate during COMMON Cares’ blood drive at the Reno show.

IBM’s expanded Power Rewards program includes System i

IBM has announced an expansion of its Power Rewards program, which hands out “points” to customers who migrate from other server vendor platforms.

The expansion, which includes migrations to IBM System i, now allows customers to migrate from x86 server platforms. Previously you could only do it from comparable server-processor platforms such as Sun Microsystems’ Sparc and Intel’s Itanium. The reward is slightly less, however: 500 “points” per x86 core compared to up to 4,000 per core when moving off Sparc or Itanium. That makes sense, obviously, because Sparc and Itanium are more powerful chips than their x86 counterparts, or presumably so.

This might be a good opportunity for IBM System i shops to migrate whatever x86 workloads they can onto the System i.

How does the point system work? Essentially the points are equal to one dollar each, and can be used to buy software licenses, IBM services, or other products from IBM. When I asked Scott Handy, a marketing vice president in the IBM Power group, why they didn’t just give cash back, he gave a dodgy answer about how customers might want to use points for a wide range of things. I would imaging that IBM just wants customers to spend points through its own rewards system rather than spending cash elsewhere.

Handy said they saw 570 migrations to Power from other platforms last year. He expects more this year, saying that IBM has “customers coming to us worried about the roadmap at Sun, HP and Intel.”

There have been some processor delays, with Intel’s quad-core Itanium, codenamed Tukwila, having been delayed, as well as Sun’s newest UltraSparc chip, a potentially 16-core processor codenamed Rock, having seen delays also. Both are expected out this year, so IBM is making its aggressive move now.

Migrations from other vendors’ x86 to IBM Power aren’t brand new, according to Handy. He said that over the 570 migrations to Power last year, about 30 came from x86.

Train your RPG employees and pay them well

It turns out that the secret to retaining good RPG programmers is simple: pay them above average, and train them well.

Is this different from any other profession? Probably not, but in the System i world, holding onto good RPG talent and keeping them happy is not an easy task. During a surprise birthday bash in California, the folks at iDevelop chatted it up with another attendee who manages a team of RPG developers. Here’s their story:

It seems that she must be doing something very right because her team returned a 96+ percent job-satisfaction rating on a recent company-wide survey. The goal the company had set was less than 75 percent so the high rating among the developers was evidence of the great job the management team was doing to keep them happy and productive.

What’s her secret? She attributes it to two major factors. First, they pay attention to salary levels in the industry and make sure they are paying a bit above the average. Secondly, and we personally believe at least as importantly, they make sure all their developers are consistently and regularly trained in the latest features and technologies related to their RPG development. She feels this investment in training not only has the obvious positive benefit of making their applications as good as they can be and the developers as productive as they can be, but it also helps tremendously in staff retention.

Sometimes doing one of the most difficult things — like getting and retaining good RPG developers — takes simple solutions.

Hey Microsoft, stop infiltrating my i

The Rational Developer for System i blog has this to say about the auto correct feature of Microsoft Office products:

I don’t know how many times a day I have to hit Ctrl+z to undo Word or PowerPoint’s “auto correction” of my i to an I (as in Rational Developer for I, Rational Team Concert for I, or IBM I). So I finally bit the bullet and removed those auto-correction rules since I don’t generally write about myself in Word or PowerPoint. Honestly, i have no idea why it took me so long

Conspiracy theorists would argue that it’s a Microsoft attempt to undermine the IBM System i platform. Grammarians would disagree. It is definitely an annoyance, as I can attest to when writing stories. I type System i, Word changes it to System I, I go back and change it to i. I have not yet shut off auto correct, but I think I will whenever I’m writing a System i story on the future. See, this is another problem with the System i. When you used to write AS400, it would never change that to I.

The return of Frank Soltis

Frank Soltis, considered the grandfather of the AS/400 and all its various prequels and sequels, is back in the IBM System i scene. Soltis has been involved with the platform since it got its start 40 years ago with the System/38 and System/36, working as an engineer at IBM.

Late last year, Soltis retired from IBM as a chief scientist, mainly because the merger of the System i and System p platforms didn’t leave any room for someone to focus solely on the IBM i. Now he’s back, though, in an advisory role with Vision Solutions.

Soltis has joined the technical advisory board of Vision Solutions, which is one of the biggest software vendors on the IBM System i. He’ll be using his experience to help guide the company’s product strategies, and heading out on a three-date European tour talking about the future of the platform, and specifically, to talk about high availability on the System i, which is what Vision Solutions sells.

He’ll be in Milan on Feb. 24, then in Rome on Feb. 26 and Paris on Feb. 27. More information at the Vision Solutions site.