It was a quiet night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. I was working the graveyard shift at the help desk, and this night I was still waiting for my first call. Marge Stetson, my supervisor, walked by and after seeing the glazed look in my eyes, told me she’d cover the phones for a few hours if I wanted to do some technical education.

Marge knew that a product called the IBM Flex Systems Manager (FSM) was being deployed in our network, and she expected us to field some questions in the next few weeks

In today’s world, IBM i developers often find themselves working with more than the relational data stored inside their trusty DB2 database. Coders can find themselves tasked with parsing many kinds of text data including: SMTP email, file contents of an IFS Folder, Java Properties files, free form comments imported from other systems, OCR data for invoices, resumes, XML, HTML, code fragments (RPG, COBOL, C, Java, SQL, VBA), and application logs.

While there are many tools available to examine plain text, a regular expression engine provides one of the best generic text processing engines available.

Yipes, it’s been over 10

The last two issues, I’ve discussed different ways to move an IBM i partition from one location to another. I talked about using traditional backup and restore techniques, as well as using logical replication High Availability (HA) software for partition migration. This week, let’s finish the series by looking at using externally connected storage including SANs, PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM, and Live Partition Mobility for moving partitions.

The Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition

To recap, there are four basic ways to move an IBM i partition.

1. Restore the partition in place or to a new location using