• Clearing The Decks Ahead Of The Power9 Launch

  May 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is ever the way: In with the new and out with the old. With the Power9 processors set for their debut sometime this summer, and shipments beginning in the second half of the year, Big Blue is looking to clear out the inventory of older Power Systems equipment it has sitting around in the barn and to remove older items from its catalog to make room for a slew of new gear.

  Over the past several months, IBM has been doing some spring cleaning, and we thought we would round all of these marketing withdrawals for Power Systems equipment …

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• IBM Bolsters Disaster Recovery With GDR For IBM i

  May 3, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM next month plans to start selling a new disaster recovery product to IBM i shops. Called Geographically Dispersed Resiliency, or GDR, the new offering is designed to give companies an easy and affordable way to recover production IBM i LPARs on remote machines. IBM’s resiliency guru Steve Finnes gives IT Jungle the lowdown on the new tech.

  GDR provides DR protection by essentially taking a production logical partition (LPAR), also called a virtual machine (VM), from one IBM i server and restarting it on another IBM i server. The VMs involved in a GDR switch must be stored on …

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• Multi-Platform App Dev Capabilities Tops List Of Midrange Dynamics Priorities

  May 3, 2017 Dan Burger

  Most of the time, we don’t go looking for the unexpected. And maybe the last place you’d look for it is in the IT department of an IBM i shop, where things are normally predictable. That mold is being broken though by organizations moving forward with multi-platform development environments.

  There’s a new playing field and Midrange Dynamics is hearing about it from the most innovative shops in its customer base. “Since IBM now supports distributed version control systems such as Git on IBM i, progressive development organizations like to have options regarding where their native and non-native source repositories are …

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• Infor Bolsters Cloud Analytics Play with Birst Buy

  May 3, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that run applications from Infor will be interested to know that the ERP giant has acquired Birst, a business intelligence and analytics software vendor with a large cloud presence. The Birst solutions will definitely be sold into Infor’s large IBM i installed base, the company informs IT Jungle.

  Birst is a soup-to-nuts platform that provides many of the software capabilities companies need to build analytic applications that can turn large masses of data into actionable insight. The San Francisco-based company was founded as Success Metrics back in 2004 with a cloud-first strategy and a goal to target …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 3

  May 3, 2017 Dan Burger

  Watson is a hive of activity with a swarm of across-the-board capabilities released rapid fire. One of the latest examples, Cognitive Visual Inspection, is designed to help manufacturers streamline their assembly line inspection process by finding and classifying faults in the manufacturing process. We have that story inside this week’s Monitor along with a few others that should be on your radar.

  Did you know it’s been five years since IBM last recorded an increase in revenue on its quarterly financial reports? That’s one heck of a losing streak. How long can that continue? Plus stories on old programs, old …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 17

  May 3, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Well, it is not an onslaught, but this week we have new PTF groups coming out of IBM for Java, HTTP Server for i, and DB2 Web Query for i V2.2.0. There is also new patches for Content Manager for IBM i 7.1 and new recommended fixes for SAP on all three currently supported releases.

  Well, maybe that is a bit of an onslaught. Rumor has it there are additional groups coming next week. It is like IBM i has its own Never Ending Story of preventive maintenance!

  The Java Group is interesting, a lot of action here. The group …

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• Contain Your IBM i Enthusiasm

  May 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the IT business, what is old is often new again. And so it is with the software containers that are taking certain datacenters by storm these days, and the virtual machines and hypervisors that run them that predate them as a volume product on X86 servers by a decade.

  Let’s have some fun with history.

  Virtual machines were invented for IBM mainframes in the VM operating system way back in the dawn of time, well, 1972 with the launch of Virtual Machine Facility/370, which ran a lightweight operating system called the Conversational Monitoring system and as it matured could …

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• Not So Hard To See i To i

  May 1, 2017 Dan Burger

  You’re not the only oyster in the stew. The IBM i community is a combination of unique ingredients that make over-generalizations risky business. The landscape looks different depending on whether your view is from the valley or the mountain. That’s why I like to talk with people with experiences that are different from my own. We learn from different perspectives.

  Mike Scanlon has worked most of his 30-plus years in the IT business in eastern Iowa. He came out of college with a software development education that emphasized COBOL. His career path eventually led to a software development job with …

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• Guru: SQL Table Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  May 1, 2017 Ted Holt

  We IBM i developers owe a great debt to Scott Forstie. He’s responsible for the wonderful DB2 for i Services and IBM i Services, which give us SQL interfaces for many functions of the operating system. Like IBM, we can write SQL interfaces to help us with non-database tasks. I recently did exactly that.

  While I can’t say that I never use the Start SQL Interactive Session (STRSQL) command, I can say that I prefer to use GUI SQL clients, in particular the Run SQL Scripts utility that is part of IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS). I do get …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Location, Location, Location

  May 1, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  Geolocation is one of the most influential technologies in the mix that constitutes the mobile internet. Even when used via a physically static device, such as a desktop PC, geolocation shapes the way users’ apps interact with many information technology services. Apple and Google are the visible leaders, but Microsoft’s Bing, well aware of the importance of geolocation in server side and client side activities, is as keen as its rivals to provide vital services. IBM isn’t yet a geolocation powerhouse, but changing circumstances may soon compel it to engage with vigor.

  The popular surface of geolocation technology is a …

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