• IBM Offers Integrated Server and Storage Support

  February 25, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you didn’t catch it, the big buyers of mainframes and high-end Power servers have been shaping IBM‘s product strategies for the past couple of years, despite all of the jawboning at Big Blue about the importance of the small and medium business server market. The truth is that there have always been at least two IBMs: one that served mainframe shops and one that serves midrange shops, and as much as IBM wants to change product and divisional names and related product strategies, it always comes to the same conclusions. The reason why IBM created the Power

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• NetManage Finishes 2007 on a High Note as Rocket Awaits

  February 25, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In December, Rocket Software, a privately held maker of System i and mainframe tools, offered $69 million to acquire NetManage, a maker of host connectivity and application modernization tools for mainframes and System i servers. The offer came after years of ups and downs and consolidation in the tools and connectivity market. And it looks like NetManage is on the financial mend as Rocket Software is working to get the financing to close the NetManage deal. In the fourth quarter ended December 31, NetManage said that its revenues hit $10.9 million, up 27 percent compared to the fourth

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• Imation Previews Super-Dense Adjacent Track Tape Tech

  February 25, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Researchers at Imation, the magnetic tape manufacturer that was spun out of 3M in 1996 and which is one of the dominant makers of removable data storage media, recently announced a new breakthrough in its tape technology that will allow it to double the capacity on existing LTO-4 tape cartridges. Materials scientist Denis Langlois from Imation recently demonstrated a new multichannel, adjacent track data writing and reading technique that the company has created for LTO-4 tapes. The new technique was shown at the Information Storage Industry Consortium trade show in San Jose, one of the epicenters of storage technology

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• Majority of IT Managers Planning for Windows Server 2008, Survey Says

  February 25, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A survey conducted for Internet computer retailer CDW found that 63 percent of IT decision makers are planning to implement Windows Server 2008, a good indicator for Microsoft and its new operating system. CDW paid a company called Walker Information to conduct the first Windows Server 2008 Tracking Poll, along with the third Windows Vista Tracking Poll, during the first week of November. The group asked 772 IT decision makers a variety of questions about their views on the two operating systems, which corresponds with a statistical error rate of 3.5 percent. The survey found that 45 percent of IT

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• Getting MySQL Working With PHP

  February 20, 2008 Brian Kelly

  This is the third in a series of four articles by Brian Kelley on PHP. MySQL is a common open source SQL database management system. It is developed and distributed by MySQL AB, a company that builds its business by providing services around MySQL. This relational database was first developed for Unix and Linux applications. It became popular when Internet Service Providers found out that MySQL was a relational database that could be offered free of charge to their Internet customers. The MySQL “product” could provide all the storage and retrieval functionality that a dynamic Web application needs. MySQL

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• LPEX Edit in Hex Mode

  February 20, 2008 Hey, Ted

  Thanks for your article, Let WDSc Help You Format Your Source Code. Prior to using WDSc, I used a tool to colorize my RPG source code. It applied different colors to various types of lines (comments, loop structures, etc.). LPEX doesn’t seem to be able to understand the hex code and displays box symbols for the hex value. Is there something in the parser controls that will make LPEX recognize the hex value or simply ignore it? –Eddie I don’t know if there’s anything in those parser controls that will make LPEX interpret those p-field codes or not, Eddie.

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• Configuring Messaging Software for Overnight Monitoring

  February 20, 2008 Hey, Joe

  For our System i messaging software, we email critical system messages to the BlackBerry phones that our techs carry. However, we want to make sure that the techs realize that an important message has arrived and that it doesn’t get lost in the tons of other email messages they receive. Do you have any ideas for segregating critical i5/OS error messages from regular email? –Jeff We recently went through a similar situation when we were deploying Bytware’s MessengerConsole monitoring and paging software on multiple System i boxes. Like you, we wanted to make sure that the important messages jumped out

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• LiveTime Service Desk Now Supports i5/OS

  February 19, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Developing enterprise-strength service desk software is not an easy task. Just ask Microsoft, which recently delayed the roll-out of System Center Service Manager to 2010, a two-year setback. Luckily, there is an established alternative for System i shops looking for ITIL-certified software to help them run their IT service desks: LiveTime Software, which recently received verification from IBM that its J2EE-based software is good to go on the i5/OS server. In information technology, it’s a fact of life that things break. Even in the System i world, where hardware is designed to go months, or even years, without

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• Modernizing the RPG Reputation

  February 19, 2008 Dan Burger

  RPG development is not what it appears to be. Or maybe it is. There are at least two ways to look at it, and whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on where you sit and perhaps what you are sitting on. For some people it’s like sitting on a comfortable old sofa. They don’t want to get up. For others, it’s more like sitting on a tack. They don’t stay seated for very long and they have a lot to say. What it is and what it isn’t is the subject of many truths, half-truths, and

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• The Fallacy of Automated Testing, and an Original Solution

  February 19, 2008 Alex Woodie

  The state of automated testing in the IT industry is so laughably bad, it almost makes you want to cry. According to statistics provided by testing tool specialist Original Software, organizations that bought automated testing tools have only managed to automate, at most, the testing of 20 percent of their applications. The other 80 percent is done the old fashioned way: by hand. While Original doesn’t have a silver bullet for this problem, it claims its blended approach to testing could provide a solution. In its new whitepaper, “The Great Software Testing Swindle,” Original Software makes a compelling case

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