• Logical Replication: Still the Mainstay for IBM i HA

  July 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  For many years, logical replication solutions were the only choice in the high availability product category for IBM i and its predecessor platforms. IBM’s introduction of PowerHA changed that, providing a dramatically different approach to achieving high availability. However, the vast majority of HA deployments in the IBM i market still use logical replication solutions. Which one is best suited for your needs? Hopefully this story will help you find the answer.

  Logical replication solutions work by replicating changes made to database files and other IBM i objects in real time. The eight third-party products in this category – including …

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• Have You Patched Those 35 Java Vulns on IBM i?

  July 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that take security seriously will want to know that IBM has issued a number of security patches over the past several months. The patch count since March includes fixes for security vulnerabilities in various technologies supported in IBM i 6.1 through 7.3, including 35 alone in Java, as well as flaws in Python, Samba, BIND, and the integrated Web server.

  Implementing security patches, or program temporary fixes (PTFs) in IBM jargon, is one of the easiest ways to ensure your system is kept up-to-date against vulnerabilities that are constantly being exposed by the hacker community. It’s also …

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• Eamon Musallam: Insights on i

  July 19, 2017 Dan Burger

  Things that make a difference. We’re all looking for what’s essential. Too often we get distracted by the inconsequential, improbable, and inapplicable. Sometimes those distractions are built into the way we’ve always done things. The fate of organizations, the fate of our professions and the fate of IBM i are in the balance.

  Last week, I had a conversation with Eamon Musallam, president of the OCEAN user group, which is based in Orange County, California. We talked about real work that is getting done by IBM i shops to solve problems and how a user group continues to be …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 19

  July 19, 2017 Dan Burger

  The graying of the IBM i workforce is opening the door for somewhat of a youth movement. Yes, that has the potential to be culturally shocking. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some youthful influence is needed in organizations (yours might be one of them) that have done little to change the IT formula in the past 20 years or more.

  This week Monitor also includes articles on what’s tormenting IBM’s cognitive superhero Watson, a blockchain blockbuster deal for IBM, and an interview with the RDi chief architect and his insights into what RDi can do for you.

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 28

  July 19, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Firmware. That “stuff” in the middle that appeared in our world when the AS400 went away. In the beginning, when the computing world was created and this unique creation was created to be something special, there was an AS/400.

  This was an all-in-one OS/TIMI/hardware computing solution. During its evolution, names have changed, compute, memory, storage, and I/O capacity has increased exponentially, and, several architectural changes have been made. Some changes have been comfortable, some not so much. One of the not-so-comfortable things is firmware. This firmware has been around forever, we just didn’t know it as a separate beast to …

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• Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.

  The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has …

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• Of Course i’s Not The AS/400

  July 17, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The AS/400 was a great computer. No doubt about that. In the pantheon of business machines, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that remotely compares to IBM’s long-lived midrange champion. But today’s IBM i on Power Systems platform has evolved far beyond the AS/400, and midrange professionals who cling to the old words and ways are doing us all a disservice. Are you one of them?

  Chances are, you’re not. If you’re reading this article, you’re likely one of the “engaged” midrange professionals who takes an active interest in news, works to improve your skills, and embraces newer technologies available …

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• Guru: Conditional SQL Unions

  July 17, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL unions combine two or more result sets into one. That’s what they were designed to do. But unions also provide a way to choose between alternate result sets, i.e. to enable or disable SELECT statements at run time. I have used this feature to advantage on numerous occasions. Here’s how it’s done.

  First consider the nature of unions. Each result set of a union can return data or no data, depending on the criteria in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. If a SELECT retrieves no data, the system appends an empty set to the union result. The way to …

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• IBM i Security Expert Interprets PCI and Multi-Factor Authentication

  July 17, 2017 Dan Burger

  With data security written boldly at the top of many organizations’ priority lists, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is viewed as a top line defense against data breaches. Whether a company handles credit cards and is required to implement mandated security measures or uses the PCI standard as a best practices model, IT security gurus pay attention to the PCI DSS.

  We are well beyond the realization that organizations need to be secure. The emphasis has clearly shifted to how organizations become secure. How to build and maintain a secure network, protect data and regularly monitor …

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• Mixed Results For IT Spending Forecasts

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have made it through the first half of 2017, and now is a good time to take a pause and count the money that the IT vendors of the world have amassed from the hardware, software, and services they provide to the datacenters of the world. And so, IDC and Gartner have done just that even ahead of the reporting of financial results for the second quarter. The results from these two firms generally agree, and they show that, as always, different parts of the business are growing even as other parts slow or even shrink.

  One big reason …

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• Sibley Elaborates on ‘Synergy’ of ILE Compiler Move

  July 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When Steve Sibley, the vice president and business line executive for IBM Cognitive Systems, announced a month ago that it’s moving development of its RPG compiler from the Rational group directly into the IBM i development organization, he cited the increase of “synergy” as the main reason for the move. IT Jungle finally caught up with Sibley last week and obtained a more detailed explanation.

  In his June 9 open letter to IBM i customers and partners, Sibley announced that development of the Rational programming tools for IBM i and ILE RPG and ILE COBOL compilers themselves would move into …

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• Programmer Productivity Underscores Remain’s App Management Upgrades

  July 12, 2017 Dan Burger

  If the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were bumped up to Eight, the original OS/400 applications could fill that slot. They were an efficient combination of form and function and built to last. But change eventually occurs. These days, it occurs more rapidly than ever. Application development strategies come in multiple shapes and sizes. We are witness to the debates and deployments of modernizations and migrations.

  Change management software has taken on a bigger role by becoming useful in multi-platform development environments (one tool for tracking all development), workflow management, and for the expanded role of application lifecycle management. …

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• DocPath Picks Up AFP Printing Where IBM Leaves Off

  July 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  If you’re looking to do fun and exciting things with your IBM i spool file output, you’ll need to look beyond IBM. With the death of AFP Utilities in IBM i 7.3 last year and the demise of InfoPrint Designer before that, it’s clear that IBM doesn’t want anything to do with printing or electronic document management. One vendor that’s eagerly investing in IBM i output is DocPath.

  AFP Utilities was a collection of programs from IBM that allowed IBM i shops to manage Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) content communicated to high-end production printers using the two-way Intelligent Printer Data …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 12

  July 12, 2017 Dan Burger

  The Scout motto “Be Prepared” is good advice for all of us. But when it comes to advice applicable to IBM i, Chief Scout Steve Will has specific advice on preparations that will be useful when the time for platform re-evaluation comes around. This article adds to Will’s advice on this topic noted by Monitor on June 21.

  This issue of Monitor also has articles on the delivery of open source PTFs, the positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence on workers, the tape storage dynasty that remains a factor even in leading edge companies, plus the influence, guidance and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 26

  July 12, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There is something new this week in the IBM i PTF Guide. We have added a link to the Memo to Users that is put out by IBM for each release. If you are not familiar with this Memo to Users, the developers working on the IBM i software stack try to put together a comprehensive guide to all the changes in the new release in the Memo to Users.

  It is a great “Shot across the bow” for those you venturing into a new release. With the sunsetting of V7R1 just months away, everybody should take a look …

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• Vision Buys Enforcive, Then Gets Sold And Merged With Syncsort

  July 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  To say that it was busy couple of days for Vision Solutions last week would be an understatement. On Wednesday, the company announced its acquisition of IBM i security firm Enforcive. The following day, Vision announced that it was being bought by Centerbridge, a private equity firm that intends to merge it with ETL provider Syncsort.

  When all the smoke from the fireworks cleared, here’s how the chips landed: Clearlake Capital Group, which acquired Vision Solutions barely a year ago and bought Syncsort in 2015, was offered $1.2 billion by Centerbridge Partners for majority stakes in both firms. That …

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• IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

  With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …

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• Guru: Retrieving Images From An SQL Table

  July 10, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I showed you how to load images from the IFS into a table that has a column defined as a BLOB data type. BLOB stands for Binary Large Object and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database.

  Our final goal is to retrieve the images from the table we loaded in part 1 and write them back to the IFS. Once we complete this task, we should end up with the same five images we worked with in part 1. To keep everything …

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• Counting Companies With An IBM i In The Mix

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  How many companies are running their mission critical business applications on Power Systems loaded with the IBM i operating system? Not as many as 20 years ago. That’s for certain. But who knows for sure? I mean, who knows the number? Three years ago, IBM was tossing out a worldwide estimate of 125,000. That number has not been officially updated but sources at IBM say the number of IBM i customers remains steady with that three-year-old estimate. On the other hand, I’ve heard people in the IBM i community guesstimate the installed base is under the 100,000 mark. It’s not …

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• Pride In Advancing The IBM i Community

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community is a global community. We sometimes forget that as we limit our view to the horizon as seen from our own IT departments. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the smart cats will tell you it’s far more likely to simply kill ignorance. The power of ideas should not be underestimated. And access to ideas is the reason the IBM i community benefits from events like the recent COMMON Europe Congress (CEC). The education and networking opportunities are what inspires people to participate, says Ranga Deshpande, president of COMMON Europe. “There’s pride in advancing the …

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