• Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear

  April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.

  But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …

  Read more

• Why Is IBM Giving AIX Shops Better Deals Than IBM i Shops?

  April 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like AIX shops got a better Valentine’s Day card than IBM i customers did.

  One of the things that was supposed to happen when the iSeries and pSeries product lines were merged back in 2000 was that a unified Power Systems organization was going to run both the OS/400 (now IBM i) and AIX software platforms on a single, unified hardware platform with a single and equal hardware price. This was something we had been demanding from IBM so long that we were blue in the face, so to speak, and to its credit, IBM stuck to the …

  Read more

• SQL To The Rescue

  April 10, 2017 Bob Cozzi

  Since the early 1990s, developers have been using SQL embedded in RPG as a way to retrieve just the right data for the task at hand. Certainly it was at least a decade before it became commonplace to see SQL embedded in RPG, but now, 15 years later, it is in fact the go-to method for data access, or at least you can see it from here.

  I was an early adopter of SQL, but an off-again, on-again user of embedded SQL. Originally, I felt the first format RPG with quasi-free format SQL (and all those plus signs to continue …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY

  April 10, 2017 Ted Holt

  UNION and ORDER BY are powerful SQL features, but put the two together and you may get some strange and frustrating error messages. Fortunately for us DB2 for i professionals, there are easy ways to make the two collaborate and cooperate. Today is a great day to be sure we understand them.

  We need some data for examples. For some of the queries, I use a customer master table (file) and a vendor master table. These are a company’s trading partners, so the two have many attributes in common, especially names and addresses. I also use two sales history tables, …

  Read more

• Blockchain: A Link In Your Long Term IBM i Plan

  April 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  In general, the IBM i community gets derogatorily tagged with having minimal tolerance for risk. Having little appetite for risk isn’t such a bad thing when the failure rate for implementing a new technology – namely blockchain – in a business environment falls just short of a sure bet. Gartner predicts that 90 percent of the enterprise blockchain projects launched in 2016 and the first half of 2017 will crash and burn within two years.

  Sounds like the kind of risk anyone would like to avoid. So why should you care about blockchain? No bandwagon recommendations, but some blockchain awareness …

  Read more

• Assessing The Ransomware Threat On IBM i

  April 10, 2017 Alex Woodie

  How would you like to be given the choice of paying a $200,000 ransom or having your server down for a month? Those are real outcomes from two recent ransomware attacks on IBM i servers, which cybercriminals may be starting to target.

  “We certainly have seen a trend recently in malware and specifically ransomware, just based on the fact that now people have figured out how to monetize infecting your server,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies for HelpSystems and its PowerTech subsidiary. “There’s certainly an increased prevalence of that.”

  Windows malware, in particular, poses a serious threat to …

  Read more

• Printing Investments In The Digital Age

  April 5, 2017 Dan Burger

  How does a company that’s invested in AFP and IPDS printing processes modernize to keep pace with increasing demand? There are certainly options. Some are better than others, with strengths varying depending on the ultimate goals. Some are more expensive than others, and that depends on whether the comparison is strictly upfront costs or considers total cost of ownership.

  For many companies, print volumes are increasing and weak performance becomes a hot button issue. Slow printer speeds, limited printer availability, and perhaps the worst of all, printer downtime, all need to be addressed. But don’t overlook workflow processes, management of …

  Read more

• Speedy PHP 7 Now Available for IBM i

  April 5, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The fast new PHP language and runtime that Zend Technologies has been working on for two years is now available for IBM i. With the delivery of PHP 7.1 and Zend Server for i 9.1 yesterday, the company says IBM i shops can expect to see their PHP applications run anywhere from 50 to 200 percent faster than before. IBM i shops will also benefit from MariaDB support and a new clustering capability.

  The introduction of PHP 7 last fall marked a major overhaul of the popular scripting language that runs on all major platforms. As the first major release …

  Read more

• Vanguard Goes Mobile With Content Management

  April 5, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Vanguard Systems last week debuted eMobile, a new mobile app that allows users to interact with its enterprise content management (ECM) system from the comfort of an iOS or Android app. As an extension to its flagship IBM i-based Vanguard ECM, eMobile keeps users hooked into the document workflow even when they’re out of the office.

  Nobody said the shift from paper-based forms to digital document management would happen overnight. Even today, in the sixth decade of mainstream business computing, paperwork that’s based on actual paper – as opposed to digital forms represented by pixels on screen – is still …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, April 5

  April 5, 2017 Dan Burger

  Technically, you don’t need SQL to survive. However, if you’re not using it, you should know what you are missing. Here’s a conversational introduction to SQL that can open the door to modern programming techniques that can modernize applications and databases by reducing the amount of coding and moving business logic to the database.

  This week’s Monitor also has articles about tech start-ups in unlikely places in the United States heartland, a new IBM Cloud and Red Hat Linux partnership built on OpenStack, IBM’s change of heart regarding work-at-home programs, and a piece on why people should and should not …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles