TFH Volume: 31 Issue: 62 Archives

What IBM i Shops Want From Cloud, And How To Do It Right

September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is no secret to readers of The Four Hundred that we are big proponents of so-called cloud computing, which doesn’t just include access to slices of servers but also storage to keep their data and networking to link them to the world and, if multiple slices share work, to link them to storage and to each other.

We never liked the term “cloud,” because it connotes a fuzzy kind of infrastructure when quite the opposite is true. We still don’t like calling it cloud computing, but language is created by consensus, not by fiat, so sometimes we have to …
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Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate

September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …
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Guru: Alternate SQL Row-Selection Criteria Revisited Revisited

September 27, 2021 Ted Holt

I am not a “do as I say and not as I do” kind of person. After I wrote the article Guru: Alternate SQL Row-Selection Criteria Revisited, I got serious about using dynamic SQL in my RPG programs instead of enabling and disabling logical expressions in the WHERE clause. I’m reliving the days when OPNQRYF was my best friend, trying to make apostrophes play nice with string concatenation.

Overall, I’m happy with the change. When I have converted the switch-laden version to dynamic SQL, I have seen a noticeable performance improvement in some cases, and at least a slight …
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IBM Adds Public Cloud Targets For IBM i Cloud Backup

September 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

The cloud has become a popular place for organizations to store backups. And with the recent Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, the number of targets for the Cloud Storage Solutions for i has increased significantly.

IBM debuted Cloud Storage Solutions for i back in 2016 as a connector that allowed Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) to push IBM i backups over the Amazon S3 protocol to the Cleversafe object storage system running in SoftLayer, the public cloud platform that would become IBM Cloud in 2018 (IBM would subsequently rename Cleversafe as IBM Cloud Object Storage).

IBM has augmented …
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The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

A lot more than you probably think, as it …
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What IBM i Shops Want From Cloud, And How To Do It Right

Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate

Guru: Alternate SQL Row-Selection Criteria Revisited Revisited

IBM Adds Public Cloud Targets For IBM i Cloud Backup

The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

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