TFH Volume: 29 Issue: 51 Archives

IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …
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New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to improbable or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

(That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …
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Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …
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Unperspective: In Your Face

September 16, 2019 Trevor Perry

A few years ago, I was asked to present a keynote session for a conference and the request was something along these lines: “I would like to learn how to change the other programmers in my shop – they won’t evolve with the times.” What a great challenge! I was ready to find the answer.

I spent some time researching this topic, and my initial thoughts were confirmed. Humans, generally, are afraid of change. As we age, our comfort zone becomes smaller – and more comfortable. We know we are good at what we have been doing for years, and …
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Maxava Hits Multiple Targets With The Same HA Arrow

September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Downtime is never a good thing for any business, except maybe for those who sell high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for a living. And to be honest, these companies explicitly want to keep the downtime and the recovery time to the smallest period as possible. The fear of downtime should be enough to motivate us all to replicate out systems.

But sometimes, just having two systems in a high availability cluster is not enough. Some companies need belts with their suspenders, and maybe even a bunch of different belts because they really can’t be down. To that end, …
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IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

Unperspective: In Your Face

Maxava Hits Multiple Targets With The Same HA Arrow

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