• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 12

  March 29, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It is a bit quiet out there in PTF Land this week. But there has been some activity. There is a new HIPER group for each IBM i release that is currently supported, and there are tweaks to Backup and Recovery Groups for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. There are also some anomalies on other groups.

  For instance, the Must Gather tools usually go along at a pace of updating every two weeks, but now it has been over a month since an update came out. Go figure. . . . The new 5733-OPS Open Source licensed programs have not …

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• The Bang For The Buck Of Entry IBM i Servers

  March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I rounded up the feeds, speeds, and pricing of the new Power S812 Mini system that Big Blue started selling in the middle of March to IBM i shops with modest computing needs. We are talking one core running at just over 3 GHz and providing an aggregate of 9,880 units of performance on the Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) online transaction processing benchmark test used to gauge the oomph of Power Systems and their predecessors.

  This ain’t a lot of computing in 2017, people. Just pointing that out. And I will …

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• IBM i Shops Seeking More Services

  March 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  Many folks view managed services as a replacement for processes that company employees used to do. Like backing up data, for instance. Slow backups and nearly closed windows for planned downtime have more organizations looking at the managed service providers for improved efficiencies and the opportunity to add a disaster recovery plan that makes sense.

  That used to be a big part of managed services, but the definition has greatly expanded in the past few years. As IT complexity has soared, there are many pieces in the IT puzzle that are missing or a bad fit in organizations that struggle …

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• Guru: Sorting Options For CPYTOIMPF

  March 27, 2017 Ted Holt

  I hope that whoever came up with the idea for the Copy to Import File (CPYTOIMPF) command was well compensated. When I think of the time and effort that that command has saved me and countless others, I feel deep gratitude. The addition of the ORDERBY parameter increased the usefulness of CPYTOIMPF, and I’d like to share that with you.

  CPYTOIMPF copies a single-format database file (table, physical file, view, or logical file) to a stream file or physical file in a format that is acceptable to another system or application. Probably the most common use of this command is …

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• As I See It: The Politics of Self-Disclosure

  March 27, 2017 Victor Rozek

  It is quite possible that two of the most unexpected and consequential events of recent times had their origins with a student in Warsaw. Perhaps if he hadn’t been accepted to Cambridge University, the fates of two nations would not now be spinning off in unforeseen directions. But he was, and in Cambridge, the ripples of his fascination with psychometrics grew into an unintended tsunami. His name is Michal Kosinski, and there are a lot of people angry with him.

  Psychometrics is the reality-based branch of psychology, at least in so far as it is data-driven. It is rooted in …

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• IBM Jacks Up Hardware Maintenance Fees

  March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It happens every couple of years or so, and in fact, it has not happened in a couple of years so it looks like we were about due. We are talking about maintenance price hikes on a slew of IBM hardware, price hikes that are aimed mostly at stemming the gradual decline in maintenance revenues that IBM’s Global Services unit is seeing as its base of hardware contracts. In theory, such a price increase boosts the profits of its services arm, but it also helps cover some of the inflationary costs associated with providing hardware support and housing parts of …

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• The IBM i Base Not As Jumpy As It Has Been

  March 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The backwards compatibility of RPG and COBOL applications on new hardware and new operating systems in the IBM midrange is unheralded in the IT sector, and perhaps is only rivalled by the longevity of applications running in Big Blue’s System z mainframes. Somewhere out there in the world are applications running on IBM i platforms that could be running code that stretches all the way back to 1969 with the System/3.

  Change is measured in the IBM i base, and with good reason. Small and medium businesses are conservative by nature because they don’t want to run any unnecessary risks, …

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• Inside Carbonite’s IBM i Plans For EVault

  March 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s been a year since Carbonite acquired the EVault business from Seagate for $14 million, and not a lot has changed, save for the addition of IBM i support in the cloud backup agent. But according to Carbonite, there are big plans underway to bolster the EVault product line, and in particular its IBM i capabilities.

  Carbonite continues to develop and sell the entire line of EVault products that it acquired in December 2015 from Seagate, according to Kashan Mohammad, Carbonite’s senior product manager in charge of EVault office solutions. (The home-based products, which account for the lion’s share of …

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• SaaS Meets MSP To Benefit IBM i Development

  March 22, 2017 Dan Burger

  Development environments in IBM i shops have a reputation for clinging to the past. Taking into account all the shops where there is ongoing development, it’s fair to estimate that two-thirds to three-quarters of IBM i users have changed their development techniques very little in the past 25 years. There was little incentive to change during the first 15 years, but during the past ten years and planning for the future things will have to change.

  Software as a service (SaaS) and managed service providers (MSPs) are gathering more attention. SaaS (subscription-based pricing) is becoming more common and MSPs are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 22

  March 22, 2017 Dan Burger

  When properly implemented, single sign-on is a beautiful thing for i/OS shops. It allows users to log on to their desktops and access all their servers without entering multiple passwords. But enabling SSO isn’t a cakewalk. Find out what went wrong in this instance involving iPads talking to the Apache Web Server and learn a lesson.

  Also in this issue are articles on the aftermath of artificial intelligence workloads relieving workers from tedious tasks, IBM’s blockchain secure network investment, and an SAP implementation that has gone off the tracks resulting in a $100,000,000 lawsuit. Sounds like a fire that’s out …

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