• IBM i Business Bucks The COVID Trend, Will Says

  June 21, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The COVID pandemic has slammed American business and the American economy in many different ways, and it has taken its toll on server sales. But according to Steve Will, the IBM i chief architect, sales of IBM i systems have grown over the past three quarters. In response, IBM has enabled Rochester to go on a bit of a hiring spree to bolster the IBM i development team.

  “The IBM i business in 2021 is actually quite strong,” Will said during his presentation at the NAViGATE conference that COMMON held the week of May 24. “We had a very down …

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• Don’t Forget About The Co-Lo Alternative To Cloud

  June 21, 2021 Jim Kandrac

  Cloud is a consumption model, not a panacea. And for a lot of customers, moving some – or even all of their applications – to the cloud is something to consider or even possibly the right move. But for many customers who are committed to their applications and therefore to their IBM i platform, the best and lowest cost way to get infrastructure to support those applications is still to put machinery on premises or to have it installed in a co-location facility.

  The numbers bear this out, and as we pointed out before way back in June 2018 – …

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• Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

  June 21, 2021 Dawn May

  This is a two-part series on how to use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) for investigating performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is the tool of choice for Db2 performance analysis, there is valuable information that you can get from using PDI. PDI is often a useful starting point to help guide you in the correct direction when trying to identify performance issues. In my experience, PDI is under-utilized for Db2 investigation. For those not familiar with PDI, you may want to read the article, Getting Started with the Performance Data Investigator …

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• The Long Play

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Surprising things persist, and for good reasons. Around this time every year, when summer is officially beginning, I take a pause and think thankful thoughts about the AS/400 and its progeny, which trace back to the June 21, 1988, launch. I didn’t enter the market until a year later, as the cub reporter and one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, my first real job out of college and one I still gladly hold.

  We have all been through a lot of change in 33 years, to be sure. The IT market is so different today from …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 25

  June 21, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  It was a relatively quiet week from IBM on the PTF patching front, and so we have used to the time to do a whole lot of tweaks to the links in the IBM i PTF Guide, which have a bunch of new and updated links embedded in the Excel spreadsheet as you will see from the list below and from the sheet itself.

  But first, you know the order of operations that we stick to every week, so here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • MGTools

  …

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• Taking A Defense In Depth Strategy With IBM i

  June 21, 2021 Bill Hammond

  The most effective approach to cybersecurity is having multiple layers of defense mechanisms deployed to protect your systems. This is commonly referred to as “Defense in Depth.”

  Because your IBM i platform holds data that is vital to your business, implementing multiple IBM i technologies that will help prevent or detect an accidental error or malicious behavior is essential.

  Watch our webcast where Carol Woodbury of DXR Security will discuss three of the current real-world issues facing organizations today and how layering multiple security technologies can protect your data and avoid business disruptions.

  Register to hear about:

  • The benefits of

  …

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• Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time is running out if you want to hear about how you can move to modern DevOps technologies and merge them with your IBM i platform, bridging the gap between new and legacy. (We don’t use the word old around these parts.)

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting the how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch …

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• IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

  Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?

  We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …

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• Guru: Use SQL To Replace Reports

  June 14, 2021 Ted Holt

  Does anybody write report programs anymore? If so, why? Reports are so twentieth-century. The people we serve want spreadsheets, Web pages, cell-phone apps and other modern conveniences. What we need is an easy way to make our report programs write the same information to modern interfaces without having to perform major surgery on them.

  Some 10 years or so ago, I built a scripting language to enable me to reformat spooled files into stream files in CSV format. I called my utility BASS. It was, and continues to be, a successful project.

  But BASS is not the only way …

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