• HelpSystems Nabs MPG for Performance Management

  August 27, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Performance Group, the Boulder, Colorado-based provider of capacity and performance management software for IBM i, is the latest software vendor to call it quits and join up with HelpSystems. It was HelpSystems first acquisition of the year and 20th since 2006.

  For decades, Midrange Performance Group, (MPG) has been one of the most trusted names when it comes to capacity planning and performance management for IBM i and the midrange servers that preceded it. If you want to know how your workload would run on a new Power Systems server from IBM, then you could find out using …

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• In Memory Of Dan Burger

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When in heaven do you start, when it has been two decades of sharing work and life together, as comrades in arms, as confidants, as companions in the heroic sense of that word?

  You can start by saying that without Dan Burger, there never would have been an IT Jungle.

  After an unexpected, brief, and intense illness, Dan passed away on August 19, to the great shock to all of us here at IT Jungle and to the people who knew Dan and know that he is gone. Dan was part of many communities, and the IBM i community was …

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• Guru: Refactoring RPG – GOTO

  August 27, 2018 Ted Holt

  When I first learned COBOL, I coded loops the way all the programmers in my shop did — with GO TO. Paragraph names were labels, not routines. Then I took a class in COBOL and learned structured programming. I’ve never looked back. I wish other people felt the same way, because I don’t like to work on GOTO-laden programs.

  Injudicious use of branching — in RPG that would be the GOTO and CABxx op codes — is a major reason I refactor. GOTO plays havoc with program “logic”, a word I hesitate to use in this context. The minute someone …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Boiling Points

  August 27, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  A three-minute egg cooks consistently most anywhere near sea level; boiling that egg will take longer up in the Himalayas. Water, like just about every other pure liquid, has at any particular atmospheric pressure a consistent boiling point. At sea level, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius; it can get no hotter. Similarly, IBM apparently cannot grow beyond $100 billion in annual revenue. Lately, its business vaporizes at a somewhat lower point, about $80 billion, like water on Mount Everest. Whenever the company adds revenue here it manages to lose it there.

  The boiling point of water is a …

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• More Withdrawals For Vintage Power Gear

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In with the new and out with the old, as the adage goes. With the Power9 line of Power Systems machines all out and for the most part available – with the exception of the high end Power E980 that will be available in stages in September and November – it is time to start winding down more of the older stuff.

  In announcement letter 918-097, IBM started to remove more things from the product catalog. The most important one in this round will happen on October 19, and that is when companies will no longer be able to …

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• iSam Blue Offers Choice for IBM i High Availability

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops searching for a high availability solution have several options to choose from. One that they might not be familiar with is iSam Blue, a small Utah company that sells a solution called iSB-HA. According to iSam Blue’s president, the company is doing well by competing on affordability and service.

  If you’ve followed the history of high availability software on IBM i and its predecessor systems, the name Robert Seal will sound familiar. Before founding iSam Blue, Seal was best known as the original developer for iTera’s data replication software, called Echo2 Seal and iTera parted ways, …

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• Debunking Legacy Myths

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the rush to modernize IT and digitally transform our businesses, legacy systems like IBM i and System z come under increased scrutiny, which is fair. After all, blind loyalty to a particular platform – even Big Blue’s historically stable ones — is a recipe for failure in a dynamic business environment. But when technology providers make questionable claims about the nature of legacy systems in an attempt to sway decision-making, those claims should bear as much scrutiny as the platforms do themselves.

  Which brings us to the recent e-book published by First National Technology Solutions and co-sponsored by Dell …

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• IBM Adds Mainstream Flash Drives To Power Systems

  August 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We tend to be focused on compute in the IT industry, and the CPUs get a lot of the glory. But the fastest CPU in the world doesn’t amount to anything without peripherals to keep it fed. That is why, of course, that the main frame was called that, after all. There were plenty of other frames surrounding it, making it into a system.

  This holds as true for the Power Systems machines as much as any other machine, and whether or not they are running IBM i, too. The good news is that IBM does a fairly good …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 22

  August 22, 2018 Dan Burger

  Power9 continues to grab headlines this week, inside and outside the Jungle, as the number crunchers continue to wonder if IBM’s latest release will result in continued good fortune (and good revenue reporting) for Big Blue. AI also stays on the hot topic list, bringing up some interesting (and maybe scary) theories for the future. But using data to your advantage can pay off big dividends and recruiters are starting to look for new ways to find the right talent for the job (think: Moneyball). Surprisingly COBOL popped up on our news radar this week with a refreshing look at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 33

  August 22, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i PTF Land is sponsored by snakes. Pythons to be specific. To be more precise, there are vulnerabilities in Python that make it susceptible to denial of service attacks.

  Here are the fixes to take care of that. Release 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 have the same number PTF applicable for all three OS releases:

  • 5733OPS Option 2 SI68164
  • 5733OPS Option 4 SI67937

  Release 7.2 and 7.3 support Python version 2.7/3.6 in the RPM format. You can find out more at this link.

  New links this week in the IBM i PTF Guide:

  • Cannot Save

  …

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