• CTO Praises Open Source, Offers Modernization Guidance

  June 12, 2017 Dan Burger

  One of the most influential and productive fields of new development is the open source community. Its magnitude is just beginning to be felt. It’s not just people talking about open source development. It’s people doing development and deriving benefit from it. And it’s people using it often times without realizing it.

  At the COMMON Annual Meeting last month, I had an opportunity to talk about open source technology with Brendan Kay, chief technology officer at Fresche Solutions, where open source solutions continue to evolve and provide benefits to internal development and the software products that company delivers to …

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• Trinity Guard Gives PentaSafe Customers a Lifeline

  June 7, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that still use PentaSafe security and auditing tools will be glad to know that a company named Trinity Guard has emerged to continue developing and supporting the products. The Houston, Texas, company has already rewritten the flagship IBM i auditing tool to support the Authority Collection in IBM i 7.3, and major rewrites for two other PentaSafe products are in the works.

  Almost 15 years ago, NetIQ bought PentaSafe for $255 million in one of the first of many deals that would help consolidate the IBM i software market in the years to come. Save for a …

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• Green Screens, Web Enablement, and LANSA

  June 7, 2017 Dan Burger

  Although there are important lessons to be learned from history, from an IT perspective, building a better future makes more sense than admiring past achievements. Not that there’s anything wrong with hard-won success. But past success does not assure future success. An easy example is a green-screen app that doesn’t translate all that well to a Web environment. Some require more modification than others to be effective in a Web environment.

  The transition from green screens to browser-based applications has caused more chins to be rubbed than a dull razor attack on five o’clock shadow. It’s also caused IBM i …

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• Linoma Takes GoAnywhere MFT to the Public Cloud

  June 7, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new release of Linoma Software’s GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) software lets customers move files to and from cloud repositories in the same way they handle transfers with on-premise systems. The cloud support reflects the major on-going shifts to public cloud infrastructure, and also addresses a previous shortcoming in the GoAnywhere product.

  Last month, Linoma announced that GoAnywhere version 5.5 now supports deployments on public cloud systems, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. The new feature allows GoAnywhere customers to securely transmit files to and from remote cloud locations, while maintaining control and audit history from the central MFT …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 7

  June 7, 2017 Dan Burger

  An IT strategy is often a major resource strategy. Where to allocate resources and how much to allocate is a big part of it. When you are the chief architect for IBM i, you set your priorities beginning with the DB2 for i database and work from there. There are competitive strategies to take into account and collaborative strategies as well. In this article, Steve Will talks mostly about the need for collaborative strategies.

  You could say open source is an important collaborative strategy for IBM i. There’s a legitimate emphasis in that direction. Building skills and increasing the IBM …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Numbers 21 And 22

  June 7, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The first couple of PTFs in the HIPER group are enough scare the wits out of you, so we just went with them. The important thing is to get them on your systems as soon as possible. You need to install the whole HIPER group.

  There was a time, a long, long time ago, when the CUME PTF pack sufficed when it came to keeping the system up to snuff. The CUME hasn’t contained all of the patches necessary to keep your systems running smoothly for quite a while, though. We need to pay attention to our Group PTFs and …

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• IBM i And AIX Won’t Get Power9 Until 2018

  June 5, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out yet, IBM’s biggest priority when it comes to the Power9 processor is Linux. Not IBM i and not AIX, which are Big Blue’s own operating system platforms and which have generated the vast majority of revenues for the combined Power platform since Linux made its debut on Power and System z machines almost two decades ago.

  As we have previously reported, IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9 processors sometime in the second half of this year, and officially has not given a precise date for when the first systems using …

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• Understanding IBM i Options For High Availability

  June 5, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There are many options when it comes to high availability (HA) for IBM i. Should you use logical replication software like MIMIX, or a hardware-based solution like PowerHA? Should you deploy to the cloud, or stay on premise? Is remote journaling the way to go or should you roll your own? IT decision-makers must do their homework if they’re going to find the right solution for them.

  If you’re in the market for a HA solution – and recent surveys indicate that many IBM i shops are shopping for HA in 2017 – then you should probably start at the …

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• Guru: Common Table Expressions Can Replace Query Chains

  June 5, 2017 Ted Holt

  Modernization efforts often concentrate on the database and programs. That is well and good, but there is more to modernization. Replacing Query for IBM i with more modern query tools is also important. But what do you do with those queries that people depend on? More confusing, what do you do with query chains?

  A query chain is a series of queries that run one after another, consolidating and reformatting data in temporary physical files, in order to produce a resulting data set, often in report form. It’s not unusual to see small CL programs like the following one:

  PGM
  

  …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: King Solomon’s Mimes

  June 5, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  King Solomon enjoys a prominent place in the Bible and Quran; in Arabic the name is Sulayman. A son of King David, Solomon was, according to scripture, the wisest and wealthiest of the Hebrew Kings. After his reign, Israel split in two, with the smaller part governed by Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the larger part by the unrelated Jeroboam. Our greatest contemporary corporate kings resemble Solomon. While none have 700 wives and 300 concubines, their lawyers, dreaming of the prenup work, may wish they had Solomon’s connubial inclinations.

  While archeologists and other scholars have not been able to put science behind …

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