Alex Woodie
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Tape: It Ain’t Dead Yet
August 29, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn 2003, the inestimable Richard Pryor got in a good, last laugh when he starred in the Comedy Central documentary “I Ain’t Dead Yet, #*%$#@!!” In some ways, you could say that magnetic tape is the Richard Pryor of the storage world: Everybody seems to think tape is already dead, but it keeps delivering the goods year after year anyway.
If your midrange shop is like most, there is probably a magnetic tape drive toiling away. That’s because, despite the repeated predictions of its death, tape still plays a critical role in the back-office IT operations of tens of thousands
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Vision Bolsters Entry-Level HA With iTERA 6.2
August 22, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreSmall and midsize IBM i shops that are looking to adopt a high availability (HA) solution to protect their businesses from downtime have a lot of options available to them these days, including cloud solutions and hardware-based offerings from IBM. SMBs looking for in-house logical replication solutions will eventually call on Vision Solutions, which recently added some enterprise-level features to its entry-level solution with the launch of iTERA Availability version 6.2.
It’s a great time to adopt HA for IBM i shops. The combination of dropping hardware and software costs, higher levels of affordable network bandwidth, and the
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Ublu: A Modern Band-Aid for Legacy i Ills
August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn a perfect world, companies would hire and retain technology professionals who possess the requisite skills for working on the IBM i server. However, that is clearly not the case, as an IBM i skills shortage has bubbled up as one of the platform’s most pressing issues. For those jack-of-all-trades who are struggling with this thing called the IBM i, the open source tool Ublu offers a bridge to familiarity.
Ublu is an interpretive scripting language designed for automating IBM i tasks from any remote platform capable of running Java, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, and other desktop operating
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Inside Infor’s Data Science Lab
August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIf you’ve noticed subtle improvements to your enterprise software lately, you’re not alone. For the past two years, IBM i ERP giant Infor has been using data science techniques to optimize various business processes that are automated by its software. And the best part may be that Infor is offering its Dynamic Science Labs expertise to customers for free and that improvements get wrapped back into the product.
The big data revolution is impacting many aspects of our lives, including how we work and play. The technologies and techniques that the big Silicon Valley Web firms like Yahoo, Google
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Bank Says ‘HA’ to System i Hardware Failure
August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhen the New Zealand bank Westpac experienced a rare backplane failure in its System i server last year, it took a critical wholesale trading application completely offline. IBM immediately put a replacement on a plane, but the best case scenario called for three days of downtime. But thanks to its use of a high availability solution from Maxava, not a single transaction was lost.
With more than 13 million customers, Westpac is one of the biggest banks in the Asia Pacific region, and one of Australia’s “big four” banks. The Sydney-based company relies on a variety of applications and
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TEMBO Adds Development Tool to Database Modernization Kit
August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreTEMBO Technology Lab is beefing up its DB2 for i modernization solution. The South African provider of DB2 for i database modernization solutions has reached an agreement with Relational Data to resell its rapid application development tool for IBM i as part of its core Adsero Optima (AO) suite.
Based in West Jordan, Utah, Relational Data is a longtime provider of IBM i-based applications and tools to the education market. Its OnePoint suite of software automates a range of processes for schools, including recording grades, managing student and parent data, and streamlining back-office functions like operations, HR, and finance.
The
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IBM i Requirements: It’s About (To) Change
August 15, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHave you ever wondered how IBM comes up with ideas for how to improve the IBM i platform? According to the IBM i chief architect Steve Will, the most strategic ideas originate internally within IBM. However, many new features come from the customer base through formal requirements processes. And this fall, IBM intends to launch a new requirements program that will allow users to vote on new features over the Web.
There are currently four formal requirements programs that feed ideas for new IBM i features to IBM. These include the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC), COMMON Europe Advisory Council
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Get Your Git On, IBM i
August 8, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreGit has officially come to IBM i. Last week, IBM released a program temporary fix (PTF) that includes binaries for an IBM i version of the popular open source change management tool that was announced as part of IBM i 7.3 earlier this year. Along with Git, IBM also released a PTF for Orion, a new Web-based IDE that works with Git and can be used to code free-form RPG from a tablet.
There’s been a lot of talk about Git in the IBM i community since it was first revealed to be coming to the platform with the launch
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Townsend Ponders Future Of DB2 Modernization Tech
July 25, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWhat will Townsend Security do with the potentially groundbreaking technology it created to solve a thorny encryption issue in DB2 for i? While the Olympia, Washington-based company is not interested in getting into the database modernization business, it is open to the possibility of licensing its innovative technology–which essentially uses Open Access for RPG to replace record-level I/O calls in legacy RPG apps with the SQL Query Engine–to people who are.
Townsend finds itself in this peculiar situation through no fault of its own. The company ran into a tough technical problem that stymied some of its largest customers in
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Blue Stack Deadline Looms for JD Edwards Shops
July 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIn just over two months, JD Edwards shops that run EnterpriseOne ERP software on the “Blue Stack” of IBM middleware, including DB2 and WebSphere products, will no longer be able to get technical support for those products from Oracle. Customers have had nearly six years to prepare for the September 30 deadline, but there are those who have yet to make a decision. Luckily, Blue Stack stragglers still have options available to them.
We told you about Oracle’s decision to kill Blue Stack support just after it announced it way back at the end of 2010. It’s been