• As I See It: Digitally Enhanced Loneliness

  February 24, 2020 Victor Rozek

  A friend of mine was dating a woman he met on social media who became frustrated because their relationship wasn’t “deep” enough. It eventually floundered which was unfortunate because outside of his primal fear of commitment, he is basically a nice guy with extensive interests and bountiful skills. I suggested, in his defense, he explain to her that although he may not be deep, given his wide-ranging pursuits he could be thought of as shallow but wide. This apparently didn’t assuage her concerns since they are no longer together, but it is indicative of two things: The disposable nature of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 7

  February 24, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s issue of the IBM i PTF Guide, we have a lot of little things and thankfully not too many big and scary things to deal with. There is not much else to say about it, so let’s just get on with it then, with the rundown by release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • None

  New (or Updated) Links this week:

  • IMGCLG: Image Catalog and Virtual Media – Maximum Capacities and Limitations
  • IMGCLG: CRTIMGCLG Specifying IFS Path in /QNTC Fails
  • QNTC:

  …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

  In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …

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• FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

  February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

  Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …

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• Guru: Using Identity Columns For Complex Keys

  February 17, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In September 2019, Ted Holt published an article that demonstrated how an identity column can be used to generate a unique key in a table. In this article, I want to expand on that theme and examine another use of an identity column — replacing complex keys.

  Using an identity column in place of a complex key makes for much faster joins between tables, as you are joining based on two numbers as opposed to values of multiple columns. Identity columns also make for joins that are easier to comprehend, since they are based on just one column. This approach …

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• IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.

  This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …

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• The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

  I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …

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• Your ERP Contract is Worse Than You Thought

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Marcus Harris knows a bit about ERP contracts and litigation. As a former lawyer for SAP and Infor, he’s the guy that ERP customers would have gone up against in court or a mediation room when a disagreement arises. But he switched sides and now he works on behalf of clients looking to hold their ERP vendors to account. He provided some worthwhile advice at the recent Digital Stratosphere 2020 conference in San Diego.

  Like most lawyers worth their salt, Harris would rather not represent you in court. Sure, it gives his firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, lots …

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• Security Still the Top Concern as Privacy Regs Loom

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For the fourth year in a row, security is the number one concern of the IBM i installed base, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey. IBM i shops are clearly concerned about the need to prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. But security’s first cousin, data privacy, also stands to gain more attention with the recent passage of data privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA.

  HelpSystems released the results of its latest marketplace survey last month, as it has done for the past six years. And just as it has for every year since 2017, security …

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• Why Koch Is Buying the Rest of Infor

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Koch Equity Development last week announced that it has bought the remaining shares of Infor that it didn’t previously own. The move puts Koch Industries in charge of the world’s third largest ERP software company, and the IBM i market’s biggest vendor. But what, exactly, drove the $110-billion industrial conglomerate into making such an investment is the subject of some speculation.

  Infor, which has been flirting with an IPO for years, appeared to be on the fast-track for a Wall Street listing in January 2019, when it raised $1.5 billion in what, ostensibly, would be the last private equity …

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