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  • Migration RPG: Another Option for RPG II Shops

    May 1, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    I bet I can make you laugh. As you are aware from reading this newsletter, IBM has warned customers that it is planning on removing support for the System/36 RPG II and System/38 RPG III compilers in the next release of i5/OS, which presumably will be called i5/OS V5R5. The plan is to charge customers for a special, unwarranted version of the RPG II and RPG III compilers in cases where they need to make changes to their RPG II and RPG III applications.

    Now, if you happen to be a heavy user of RPG II, I suspect a few things about you. First, your company doesn’t like to spend a lot of money on computers. Second, you don’t like change for change’s sake. Third, you have probably been able to make RPG II do all kinds of unnatural things it was never intended to do–and you are quite proud of that, but no one but a few of your peers understand how clever you are. And fourth, you don’t like being told what to do, by IBM or anybody else. In other words, you and I would have a great time shooting the breeze over a beer somewhere.

    A few weeks ago, I outlined some of the options that RPG II and RPG III shops have in dealing with the situation. IBM is not taking the runtime environments for RPG II and RPG III applications out of that future i5/OS release, just the ability to change and recompile those applications on that release. Of course, there is a simple way to get around that: Just get an AS/400 or iSeries box and put V5R4 or an earlier release and the older compiler toolset onto it and give that to developers. You tweak your RPG II and RPG III code on this box, compile it, and move it over to the other i5/OS V5R5 box. This is a pain in the neck, of course, especially for shops that have consolidated development and production onto logical partitions on a modern AS/400, iSeries, or System i machine.

    There is, of course, another option if your applications are coded in RPG II and you want to keep using RPG II and not move to RPG IV. It’s called Migration RPG, and it is an RPG II compiler for the OpenVMS operating system that is owned by a company called Migration Specialties International.

    See? I told you I could make you laugh.

    If you think that the System/3X, AS/400, and iSeries platform has been badly treated in the past few decades, you should consider the neglect and ill treatment that the VMS platform received at Digital Equipment, Compaq, and then Hewlett-Packard. To its credit–or more accurately, to help it stay alive–HP did revive a port of the OpenVMS mini-computer operating system to the Itanium processor, and as of January 2005, it was available on entry Integrity servers, which also support HP-UX, Linux, and Windows side-by-side with OpenVMS.

    I had known from years gone by that Digital had an RPG II compiler, which it created for the VAX line not just to try to steal away some business from IBM’s System/3X line more than two decades ago, but because way back then, before C and Unix were commercialized, RPG was a language that many platforms supported. IBM, Sperry, and Burroughs mainframes all had RPG compilers, as did a number of other minicomputers. If you wanted to support business applications, you needed COBOL and RPG. (And, I will say this: All the things that made RPG a good language for creating business applications good are still essentially true today. If there was a thing as an interpreted version of RPG and an RPG Virtual Machine, we would not be talking about Java, which is just a souped-up version of C++ that runs on an abstracted, virtualized machine.)

    Like most things midrange, Migration RPG has a very long history, which you can read about here. I will give you the short version. Digital had its own internal RPG II compiler, called VAX RPG II, which was an RPG II compiler that was not compatible with IBM’s RPG II. This limited its appeal on the market. A company called Native Software, which was based in Richmond, Virginia, created an IBM-compatible RPG II compiler called Migration RPG in 1982. Bruce Claremont, the owner of Migration Specialties, which is based in Florence, Colorado, was the lead engineer at Native Software, and in 1986, Digital started reselling Migration RPG. In 1989, just after the AS/400 was launched and when System/36 customers were howling about the performance and porting issues of moving RPG II applications to OS/400, Digital bought Native Software and Claremont was tapped to run the center for migration services at Digital. In 1992, that group was shut down in one of the many layoffs Digital had, and Migration RPG was in limbo until Claremont secured the rights to the software in 1995. (This happened, he told me, because a customer sued Digital for not supporting the software, and as part of the settlement, Claremont got the rights to the product.) Claremont has ported the code to run on OpenVMS on Alpha chips, and in 2004 was one of the first people to port an application to the OpenVMS on Integrity platform for HP. All of this means that you can run RPG II applications on a modern OpenVMS server.

    Claremont says he doesn’t make a lot of money these days on Migration RPG–he has a half dozen customers on support–and he makes a living on consulting and general support services for the VAX and AlphaServer OpenVMS environments. Claremont says that he hasn’t done any migrations from System/36s or AS/400s for years, but IBM’s moves with the System/36 RPG II compilers might be helping out his business in the long run. History might help him, too. “It was every bit as difficult to get to the AS/400 from the System/36, and I would argue that, for a time, it was easier to get to RPG II running on VMS using our product,” says Claremont. He handled hundreds of migrations in his years at Digital, so he would know.

    To do a migration from RPG II to Migration RPG, you have to do three things. First, you have to convert the flat-file database files from EBCDIC data format to ASCII data format. Migration RPG includes a qualifier so this data can still be sorted according to EBCDIC codes after it has been moved to ASCII, which obviously has a different format and would result in different characters being formatted in different orders if sorting was hard-coded. The data can be stored in indexed, direct, and sequential formats. Then you move the RPG II code over. Claremont says that Migration RPG is 99 percent compatible with IBM’s last System/36 RPG II compiler. The big change is converting from the System/36’s OCL to the equivalent job control language on the OpenVMS platform, which is called DCL, or Digital Control Language. Claremont has created a tool that converts OCL to DCL, and it does between 90 and 95 percent of the work; the rest needs to be tweaked by hand. He explained that most control languages are very similar, and that a good programmer can pick it up in no time. The important thing is, when the port is over, RPG II applications are running on an OpenVMS platform. “You get the same green screens, the same look and feel, and they act just like the System/36 applications you have,” says Claremont. “A lot of work went into making sure that was true.”

    If you buy a baby Integrity rx1620 server with OpenVMS 8.2, it will probably cost about $10,000, says Claremont, and Migration RPG costs another $3,500 plus $1,600 a year for maintenance. So for around $15,000, you can have the RPG II machine that IBM no longer wants to sell you.

    Now, I know what you are thinking. First, how come Claremont hasn’t jumped on the open source bandwagon and created an open source RPG compiler? And how come he hasn’t kept Migration RPG current with RPG III and then RPG IV? Well, first of all, he is only one guy and he has to make a living. Second, Migration RPG was created in the Macro-32 assembly language for the old 32-bit VAX platforms. “I never did bother to convert Migration RPG to C because I saw ASNA, California Software, and others in the market, and I just didn’t think there was enough room in the market for me,” Claremont explains.

    The question now is, are there enough people out there with the smarts and desire to convert the Migration RPG product to C++, give it RPG IV functionality or maybe even a virtualized environment like Java has, and help Claremont get into some real trouble? If you are interested, bug him. He finds the idea very amusing, but he can’t do it alone.

    RELATED STORIES

    System/3X RPG Compiler:

    The Lowdown on S/36 and S/38 Compilers in i5/OS V5R5

    IBM Sort Of Clarifies Plans for S/36 and S/38 Environments

    System i5 V5R4 Software Announcement Roundup

    IBM Is Not Killing Off RPG III, RPG/400 in i5/OS

    OpenVMS on Integrity:

    HP Ramps Up OpenVMS on Integrity Servers

    OpenVMS 8.2 Ships on HP Integrity Servers

    HP Debuts Skinny Itanium Boxes, Talks Up OpenVMS and NonStop

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    Tags: Tags: mtfh_rc, Volume 15, Number 18 -- May 1, 2006

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    Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

    COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

    “Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

    The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

    However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

    When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

    CONTINUE READING ARTICLE

    Please visit ucgtechnologies.com/IBM-POWER9-systems for more information.

    800.211.8798 | info@ucgtechnologies.com

    Article featured in IT Jungle on April 5, 2021

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TFH Volume: 15 Issue: 18

This Issue Sponsored By

    Table of Contents

    • UC4 Sales Rocket Skyward in the United States
    • NetManage’s First Quarter Disappoints
    • Migration RPG: Another Option for RPG II Shops
    • Migration RPG: Another Option for RPG II Shops
    • AttachmateWRQ Pays $495 Million for NetIQ
    • AttachmateWRQ Pays $495 Million for NetIQ
    • IBM and Partners Target Casinos with the System i
    • IBM and Partners Target Casinos with the System i
    • The Hardware Foundry
    • The Hardware Foundry

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