• Power8 Upgrade Yields Processing Dividends for Growing SAP Shop

  October 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the great things about the IBM i platform is how it grows and adapts to the companies that use it. Businesses can start with a small Power Systems server, and as the scale of their operations grows over the course of years, they can expand their IBM i processing footprints in a relatively easy manner. This pattern has played out time and time again, and the latest to use it is the German distributor HANSA-FLEX. Based in Bremen, Germany, HANSA-FLEX is one of Europe’s top distributors of hydraulic parts. The $450 million company maintains a catalog of 95,000

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• A Different View Of IBM i And PASE

  October 19, 2015 Dan Burger

  PASE is the AIX runtime environment that is integrated into the IBM i operating system. Most IBM i community members know of it. Comparatively few actually know it. It’s not a wild guess to say most IBM midrange shops that use the TCP/IP networking stack, the Java virtual machine, the Apache Web server, or the PHP runtime are unaware that these were crafted for AIX and are running inside of PASE. There’s reason to believe that PASE awareness may be on the rise. What’s that mean, if anything, to you? PASE brings added functionality to the IBM i OS by

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• Equity Speaks: Q&A With The H.I.G. On HelpSystems

  October 19, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Equity Speaks: Q&A With The H.I.G. On HelpSystems As expected, H.I.G. Capital‘s plan to acquire HelpSytsems cleared all regulatory hurdles, and the deal was finalized last week. In a Q&A with IT Jungle, the H.I.G. partners in charge of the deal elaborate on plans for HelpSystems, as well as their view of the IBM i market and the IBM Power Systems server. Fraser Preston, a managing director at H.I.G., and Aaron Tolson, a principal, were the main drivers of the deal to buy HelpSystems from Summit Partners, which was announced in August. Preston and Tolson agreed to

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• Tiered Storage Upgrade Boosts BRMS

  October 19, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) found a front row seat during the IBM i Technology Refresh announcements this month because of its new tiered storage capabilities. IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will made note of it in his most recent You and i blog, which featured Will’s picks for top news items among the early October IBM announcements. That tells me IBM i customers have been delivering a message or two about what BRMS needed. From Will’s blog: “Until recently, there was a rather simple ‘tiered storage’ capability in BRMS that would detect how frequently a library was

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• As I See It: Biology On The Wing

  October 19, 2015 Victor Rozek

  The solemn pod arcs in unison and disappears beneath blue water, leaving telltale plumes dancing in the breeze. I’m perched on weather-carved rocks on the extreme southern end of a small Canadian island called Saturna, watching a pod of killer whales sweep around the point. They pass by a mere stone’s throw from shore, on their way to ancient feeding grounds. But they are not alone. A hundred yards beyond, a picket line of boats filled with grasping tourists tracks their every breach. Once hunted, they are now annoyed. Once victims of persistent greed, they now endure persistent curiosity. From

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• IBM Updates PowerVM Hypervisor, PowerVC OpenStack

  October 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may seem like the only thing that IBM cares about lately in the Power Systems business is boosting its Linux-based L and LC series lines. But as the latest Technology Refresh updates from October 5 demonstrate (which we have reported on extensively at IT Jungle in the past two weeks), Big Blue is keen on updating the software stack on which IBM i shops depend. And in some cases, this also includes the hypervisor and management tools, as well as Linux running next to IBM i. In announcement letter 215-262, IBM is updating the PowerVM hypervisor that it

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• GCC: Bringing More Open Source Software to IBM i

  October 14, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the more interesting parts of last week’s IBM i announcements (if easily overlooked) was the introduction of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to the platform. As IBM‘s product manager for the IBM i explained last week, the addition of GCC essentially opens the door to bringing a wide range of open source packaged applications to the IBM i environment, and provides a key building block for IBM moving forward. During his October 5 webcast on the COMMON Europe website (which you can view below), IBM i product manager Tim Rowe discussed the importance of open source software

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• What JSON on IBM i Can Do For You

  October 14, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the most compelling new features that IBM added to the DB2 for i database in recent memory is support for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which has become the de facto standard interchange format for Web data. John Eberhard, a software engineer in IBM’s Rochester lab, recently led IT Jungle through some of the major capabilities that the new JSON data store can provide to all you IBM i shops out there. IBM shipped a technology preview of the new JSON store earlier this year with updates to IBM i 7.1 and 7.2. Unfortunately, the JSON store did not

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• RPG, XML, SOAP, and REST: Web Services for IBM i

  October 14, 2015 Dan Burger

  Anyone following the evolution of Web services has seen the RESTful architecture gaining ground quickly on the traditional favorite SOAP architecture. Web development and particularly Web-based mobile development has welcomed REST. To keep up with demand, Krengel Technology has introduced version 3.2 of its RPG-XML Suite, which delivers new Web service capabilities to IBM i customers. Krengel developed the RPG-XML Suite for RPG developers who, as the Krengel website notes, “have lived through creating Web services in RPG and Java without a well-packaged development toolset.” Web service basics: An RPG program calls a Web service that resides on another machine.

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• Taming SQL Queries with a CozTool

  October 14, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Bob Cozzi has done a lot with the IBM midrange server platform–probably more than most, including founding the platforms’ first publication and presiding over its largest user group at one point. But Cozzi may have top it all with his latest creation: A handy little database utility called SQL Query File that he developed and sells through his software company, CozTools. SQL Query File is a green-screen tool designed to let IBM i professionals quickly and easily query their DB2 for i database using standard SQL, right from the command line. You can cut the SQL you previously used

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