• First Open Source Conference For IBM i Shops Planned

  November 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too. Getting a grip on a project without the financial investment of buying software and signing service contracts appeals to some shops that prefer to keep their business an internal affair. And there

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• Power Systems Shows Growth Again For Big Blue

  October 26, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good news is that the Power Systems division of IBM‘s Systems Group turned in its third consecutive quarter of revenue growth, something that the Power community of customers, resellers, and software developers most certainly want to see. The bad news is that the rising U.S. dollar compared to other foreign currencies means that overseas sales translate into fewer greenbacks when sales are brought back to IBM’s New York headquarters, masking that growth. IBM does not report revenue figures for the its Power Systems and System z server lines separately in its financial presentations, but chief financial officer Martin

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• Rimini To Pay Oracle For Copyright Infringement, Damages

  October 26, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Rimini Street this month was ordered to pay Oracle $52.8 million in penalties for infringing on its copyrights for JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle database software. Despite that, the third-party provider of maintenance and support claimed a moral victory over Oracle, and praised the court for essentially declaring its business model legal. After years of legal wrangling, the jury finally heard arguments from both companies in Oracle v. Rimini Street during a trial that started in late September and continued into early October. The jury was asked to determine whether Rimini had violated Oracle’s copyrights while servicing the ERP,

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• It Is Time To Tell Us What You Are Up To

  October 26, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  None of us in the IBM i community can do well by driving down the road at dawn without the headlights on, and without market research, we can’t tell where we are at and where we are going. Back in the early days of The Four Hundred, when having a midrange system at all made you cutting edge, rich data about the customers using these systems was available, for the clever at least. We were among the clever, but we were dependent on other organizations to do the demographics and survey work that brought us those rich datasets, and

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Torque Is Cheap

  October 26, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  “Screw it,” said Archimedes of Syracuse, refusing to surrender to the gravity of the situation. Around 250 B.C., he developed a water pump that converted torque to lift. It was a helix inside a cylinder, a progenitor of propellers and augers. Archimedes also devised ingenious ways to calculate volume and mass. Archimedes’ two principal pursuits, applied physics and applied math, are as important today as ever, particularly for IBM’s current passion, the Internet of Things. But IBM’s IoT prowess, like Archimedes’ “eureka,” may be apocryphal; it remains, at best, unproven. The “eureka” story has been around a long

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• Academic Initiative Lives Up To Its Name

  October 26, 2015 Dan Burger

  The day will come. You’ll be better off if you start preparing now. Skills replacement is something you have to plan for. Reacting to skills lost through retirement or other avenues is a too little, too late scenario. You build a skills pipeline by bringing people into your organization and you move them along through the company. Aiding that effort is the IBM Power System Academic Initiative, which has been making some notable progress lately. Just a little more than a week ago, the Academic Initiative (AI) began promoting its new RPG course curriculum, a long overdue effort to

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• Accur8 Takes Aim at Data Virtualization Opportunity

  October 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

  After years of working for others inside and outside of the IBM i community, Glenn Marchesani is now branching off on his own. His new venture-debt funded startup, called Accur8 Software, is now selling a tool that, among other things, enables power users to quickly and easily build SQL-powered apps by providing a data virtualization layer atop existing systems and databases, including DB2 and IBM i. Marchesani is only 44 years old, but he has more experience than developers who are much older. The son of DB2/400 subject matter expert Skip Marchesani, Glen grew up around the AS/400, attending

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• IBM Offers Tech Preview for iASP-Based HyperSwap

  October 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The future of HyperSwap on IBM i became a little more clear this month with IBM‘s October 5 announcement. That’s when IBM shared details on a new Technology Preview for HyperSwap supporting independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs), which will allow more fine-grained failover of IBM i environments that are protected in PowerHA Enterprise Edition environments. HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature that IBM debuted in its PowerHA Express Edition last year with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The technology, which was originally developed years ago for System z mainframes, relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous

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• PowerTech Adds Centralized Management for Exit Points Security

  October 21, 2015 Dan Burger

  Insufficient data is the cause of all sorts of bad stuff. It could be the reason that two-thirds of IBM i shops have no network exit point programs in place. It’s not that information on exit point security doesn’t exist at tens of thousands of IBM midrange shops. But it is a lack of awareness that results in serious security weaknesses. With no steps taken to secure exit points, popular protocols like FTP and ODBC are potentially exposed. PowerTech, the IBM i security software vendor under the HelpSystems umbrella, advises that monitoring the exit points is critical because the

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• Guardium Stands Tall Over DB2 on i Data

  October 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

  You may have tough security policies and follow IBM i security recommendations to the letter. But if you’re in a regulated industry, that’s not good enough–you need to actually prove you’re doing things right, and that means auditing. IBM i shops that face these requirements may want to check out the latest release of IBM‘s Security Guardium software, which includes new capabilities for IBM i. Buried in IBM’s October 5 announcement for IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 11 and IBM i 7.2 TR3 were several snippets about Guardium and IBM i’s relationship to it. The new TRs mesh with

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