IBM i Technology Refresh 7 is bound to make some people bark. Any time you mention these three letters–RPG–the ears of the IBM midrange community perk up like a half sleeping dog that notices a cat cutting across his territory. And RPG is going to get some attention as people hear about TR7, which officially will be released tomorrow, October 8.

This all begins, simply enough, with new free format options being added to RPG IV. RPG free-form was introduced with i5/OS V5R4 in 2001. That’s more than 12 years ago. During that time IBM made free form its RPG

Q&A With Doug Balog, Power Systems GM

Doug Balog took over as general manager of the Power Systems division this past summer after having run IBM‘s System z mainframe business for a little more than a year. Balog has been in charge of development for the System x, BladeCenter, and TotalStorage disk arrays before that, and in fact he cut his teeth at Big Blue three decades ago working on chips for the System/390 mainframes and eventually was put in charge of OS/390 systems software development as the 1990s came to a close.

To say that Balog has a

Native RPG development on the IBM i server was largely tamed long ago by change management and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools. But as IBM i shops extend their RPG investments with new Web-based front-ends written in languages like HTML, PHP, and CSS, cracks have emerged in that ALM wall. Last week, Business Computer Design Int’l. and ARCAD Software announced a partnership that aims at closing some of those gaps for BCD’s WebSmart users.

The partnership between BCD and ARCAD will see the two companies working to integrate their respective tools, namely BCD’s WebSmart development environment–including the ILE CGI and

Helen Morrison was a single woman with an age-old dilemma. Entering midlife, she wondered if she would ever meet a suitable partner and, frankly, she was getting lonely. But although Morrison longed to be married, she had no acceptable way of meeting men socially. Respectable women did not frequent taverns, nor were desirable partners likely to be found loitering over pints at the nightly watering hole.

But Morrison found what would become a visionary solution to her quandary: She placed a personal ad in her local paper, the Manchester Weekly Journal. Her “Lonely Hearts” ad was the first of

It’s the fall, and more importantly, it is the beginning of the fourth quarter. And historically, that usually means that IBM is gearing up to make some announcements. As it turns out, this is precisely the case, and Big Blue is getting ready to make a slew of systems announcements–at least judging by the lineup for top executives that are hosting a webcast scheduled for this week.

The webcast, which you can register for here, will be hosted on the morning of October 8 and is meant to also be timed to an event that CEO Ginni Rometty and

EnterpriseTech Site

As most of you know, I have almost always had two different writing jobs. Sometimes I manage multiple publications at the same company, such as I did for several years at Midrange Computing or later at IT Jungle. Sometimes I work for two different companies, as I have done for the past five years with my job here as editor of The Four Hundred and over at The Register as systems editor.

I do this for professional as well as economic reasons, because one job always informs what I am writing in the other. And, to be

A Department of Labor grant application that would further the development of a standardized IBM i curriculum that could be implemented at participating colleges and universities has been rejected, sending the grant writing team of IBM midrange advocates back to the drawing boards. Jim Buck, who guides the IBM i educational curriculum at Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin, advised me of the setback last week.

To bolster the grant application, 119 companies participated in a survey that prioritized skills that college graduates could possess that would make them candidates for job opportunities. An email was sent to the companies (78

Whether you are part of a large enterprise or a small business, it is inconceivable to think your company is not aware of the explosion in cloud computing in recent years. Even if a cloud deployment isn’t in your organization’s immediate future, keeping an eye on the trends can help you make a better decision about going cloud should the time ever come.

The analysts at Gartner make it their business to follow what’s happening in IT, and there has been some movement in the cloud market that has caught their attention. In a recent report, Gartner says nearly half

If you are looking to install IBM‘s Storwize V3700 storage arrays, which are compatible with the IBM i -Power Systems platform and which are also the storage devices at the heart of the PureSystems modular systems, then IBM has a deal for you.

In announcement letter 313-094, IBM is putting out the System Storage V3700 Advanced Function offering, and this gives customers who buy a minimum hardware configuration some freebie software that runs on the arrays. Specifically, you have to buy a dual-controller version of the V3700 array and a minimum of a dozen disk drives or flash

Disk array makers are trying to make it up in volume, and they are not succeeding. This is the second quarter in a row that revenues have fallen.

According to the latest statistics from IDC, disk array storage capacity shipments were up 21.5 percent in the second quarter ended in June, to a total of 8.2 exabytes. This disk array market was able to grow capacity shipments by between 30 and 40 percent a year, which kept revenues growing. But with thin provisioning, data compression, virtualization, and other technologies being more widely deployed on arrays, it is getting harder