TFH Volume: 29 Issue: 35 Archives

IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …
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It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …
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Guru: Getting Started With Python On IBM i

June 10, 2019 Stephanie Rabbani

Python is one of my favorite open-source languages. I’ve used it to build web applications, utilities, and diverse tools such as a web server monitor and an automated application testing suite. In this article, I’ll show you how to install Python on IBM i and create your first program.

Why Python? For several reasons.
- You can use Python to do some cool processing on your system. Graphical application development, games, data analysis, and web development are all Python’s strengths.
- Coding in Python is easy, relatively speaking. The syntax is easy to learn, dropping the formal verbosity found in traditional
…
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Server Buying Cools, But It’s Cool – Don’t Panic

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When a market is comprised of hundreds of thousands of customers, things tend to level out and are a lot more predictable than when there are relatively few customers. Before the public clouds took off a decade ago and before the hyperscalers created such large infrastructures to support billions of users running their applications, server buying was a lot smaller and it was also more predictable. Things tended to grow slowly, methodically and they also took time to slow down because not everyone felt an economic decline or a transition to a new system architecture at the same time.

That …
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The Transition To RHEL 8 Begins On Power Systems

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If it is not already obvious to you, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to be the default and preferred variant of the Linux operating system that will be available on IBM’s Power Systems and System z servers at some point in the not-too-distant future when Big Blue’s $34 billion acquisition of the commercial Linux distributor closes.

As we pointed out last fall when the deal was announced, we don’t know precisely how IBM will rectify some of the overlaps between the two product lines after the deal closes. What will IBM will do with the WebSphere and JBoss Web …
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Situation Wanted: DBCS Conversion Expert For Apps Sold Into Japan

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Daniel Pirani is a programmer at Columbus Consulting International, based in that capital city in the state of Ohio, and he has recently done a double byte character set (DBCS) conversion of an RPG application so it can be sold into the market in Japan in the indigenous language. We heard of two vendors at the recent POWERUp 2019 conference in Anaheim who had done a similar DBCS conversion, and Pirani coincidentally reached out to us to see if there was demand for such services. We think there could be, and there is only one way to find out: Ask …
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IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

Guru: Getting Started With Python On IBM i

Server Buying Cools, But It’s Cool – Don’t Panic

The Transition To RHEL 8 Begins On Power Systems

Situation Wanted: DBCS Conversion Expert For Apps Sold Into Japan

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