• The Dollars And Sense Of Business Continuity

  September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those companies that have been in the IBM midrange market for a long time and are still alive and kicking have undergone a lot of change over the decades. But as is also the case, the core people at the company have been there for a long, long time and they understand how to leverage change to drive business and absorb change to help customers cope.

  That is one of the secrets of longevity for Datanational, founded in September 1979, which is located in the Farmington Hills suburbs of Detroit and which has always had a strong presence in …

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• Guru: SQL Can Read Program-described Data

  September 21, 2020 Ted Holt

  I thought I left program-described database files behind me in 1988. That’s when I left my last S/36 shop to begin working on the S/38. Well, I did, but not completely. From time to time I work on a system with program-described files, and even some externally described files have program-described fields. Fortunately — and I owe this to Scott Forstie — I have learned that SQL can read program-described data. Will wonders never cease?

  You may be thinking, “This article doesn’t apply to me. Our files are externally described.” You may be right. Then again, you may be wrong. …

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• POWERUp Delivers A Virtual Shot in the IBM i Arm

  September 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic may have caused COMMON to cancel its in-person conference – twice – but it couldn’t stop the group from bringing the IBM i community closer together. Thanks to modern video conferencing technology and the last-minute efforts of volunteers and staff members, COMMON pulled off what may be the group’s most unique annual meeting in its 60-year history.

  COMMON president Larry Bolhuis certainly earned his keep as the head of the national IBM i user group during the tumultuous past six months. The leader, who doesn’t actually get paid for his work with the Chicago, Illinois-based organization, helped …

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• The Converged Systems Conundrum

  September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The idea behind converged and hyperconverged systems was one that AS/400 and IBM i shops have long been familiar with, but which customers using other systems had become unfamiliar with or had never known as they adopted other systems for their mission critical systems. It’s so simple that it can be expressed in one word: integration. Yes, that’s the i in IBM i, and while this is the hallmark of the System/38, the System/36, and the AS/400 platforms from decades ago, ironically the IBM i platform is not considered a converged or hyperconverged platform by the market researchers at …

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• LTO-9 Specs Reveal Compromise

  September 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The three companies behind the linear tape-open (LTO) tape standard released the specifications for LTO-9 last week. Those looking for a doubling of capacity over LTO-8, which was the plan according to the group’s product roadmap, will be disappointed.

  Tapes based on the just-released LTO-9 specification will be able to store 18TB without compression and 45TB of data with 2.5-to-1 compression turned on, the LTO Program announced last week.

  Those capacities represent just a 50 percent increase over LTO-8’s specifications. However, according to the LTO Program roadmap published in 2017, the group had been targeting 30TB of native capacity and …

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• Creating Web Services APIs Can Be Easy On IBM i

  September 16, 2020 Andrew Ireland

  Many IBM i customers are taking a hard look at how they can bring their heritage applications, along with all the significant business value they contain, into a modern world. There are a number of different approaches to do that, and in reality, these methods work together and complement each other. There is no one single route, but rather a combination of approaches that leads to the best results at the lowest cost and the least grief.

  The average IBM i customer has something in the order of five million lines of code that embody their mission critical applications. Companies …

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• OpenLegacy Expands Big Data Partnerships

  September 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over the past few months, OpenLegacy has established new partnerships with a handful of tech firms patrolling the big data waters, including Talend, Collibra, and BigID. According to the legacy application modernization specialist, it’s all part of an effort to help its IBM i and mainframe customers upgrade their applications and experiences.

  OpenLegacy is unique among IBM i modernization vendors in its approach. The company’s software allows customers to expose legacy applications, such as those written in RPG, via APIs and Web services.

  Now the company is bringing several partners into that API-driven approach. For instance, its partnership with Talend …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 16

  September 16, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Virtual POWERUp 2020 is happening this week, the first time ever being completely online, and possibly the first time ever attending an online conference for many of you. Personally, I like the travel and seeing people in person, plus who doesn’t like the happy hours in the exhibit hall? But we are all learning to adapt and it seems almost fitting that COMMON is celebrating a “quarantine” birthday as so many of us have done this year. At 60 years young, COMMON has quite a legacy of serving the members of this community with education and resources to enhance their …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 37

  September 16, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  This week, we find some potential security threats lurking in the Apache Web server that is embedded in IBM i and just about every other datacenter operating system in the world. To be specific, take a look at Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in Apache HTTP Server affect IBM i, which you can find at this link. The fixes for this security vulnerability are:

  • Release 7.4: SI74088
  • Release 7.3: SI74074 and SI74087
  • Release 7.2: SI74073

  Now, without further ado, here’s the PTF rundown by release:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.1: …

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• Jenkins Gets Closer IBM i Hooks, Courtesy Of ARCAD

  September 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For some time, IBM i shops have been behind the curve when it comes to using modern DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) technologies and techniques. ARCAD Software has been working to close that gap through its work with Git and Jenkins, and thanks to its new integration with an enterprise version of Jenkins from CloudBees, the gap is pretty much closed — at least from a technology point of view.

  Jenkins, if you don’t know yet, is a popular open source project that allows DevOps professionals to build, test, and deploy their software as part of a CI/CD …

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