• The X Factor: Survive, Adapt, Repeat

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are like me and you have been working for at least 30 years, you are supposed to be rich by now. Isn’t that the American dream? To be an entrepreneur, to cut your own swath through the business world, to find your niche and expand it, to be safe. So it is with us personally, so it goes for most of the millions of companies that are trying to stay in business in the world. Isn’t this supposed to be a lot easier than it is? What on earth is wrong with the economy–I mean the global one

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• i5/OS V5R3 Support Ends in April 2009

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The other shoe has dropped, like most of us expected it would, for OS/400 V5R3. With the announcement last week of i5/OS V6R1, which begins shipping on March 21, IBM getting customers on the older V5R3 release of the operating system ready for the day when support will no longer be available for that platform. That day, we learned last week, is April 30, 2009. Just about a year ago, IBM announced that it would stop selling OS/400 V5R3 and related systems programs as of January 8, 2008. And with i5/OS V6R1 looming large since July of last year, it

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• Reader Feedback: Run Collection Services Before You Upgrade

  February 4, 2008 Hey, TPM

  Good article and guidance regarding moving to V6R1. [Editor’s Note: The reader is referring to Bracing for i5/OS V6R1 and the Winding Down of V5, from the January 14 issue of The Four Hundred.] If you get the opportunity, remind folks to run the system’s Collection Services before moving to capture a set of baseline performance data. Once they move the data, if not needed, it can be erased. If they move and have some performance issues, they have a base to compare to. Otherwise, it’s really a challenge for the performance analyst to make good decisions as

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• IBM Brings SAN Performance to Parity with Internal Arrays

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400, iSeries, and System i platform has been on the vanguard of technologies lots of times in its long history. They were rack-mounted long before that was cool, they always used the most advanced CMOS processor designs, they employed asymmetric multiprocessing, small form factor disks, the densest main memory, and so on. One area where the i5/OS and OS/400 platform has not been at the front end of technology is in storage area networks, or SANs. With the announcements from IBM last week, that is about to change. The concept of storage area networks is a bit “back to

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• Let’s Take a Closer Look at JS22 Blade Servers Running i5OS V6R1

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No new server hardware relating to the i5/OS platform was announced in conjunction with the launch of i5/OS V6R1 last week, but IBM did, as expected, say that V6R1 would be the official release supported on the JS22 two-socket, Power6-based blade server that IBM announced last November. The JS22s come in a standard BladeCenter form factor and can be plugged into either the new BladeCenter H chassis, which runs on 220/240-volt power and comes in a 9U rack-mounted form factor with room for 14 vertical blades. The BladeCenter S chassis, which is aimed at small and medium businesses and office

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• Alternate Operating System Support Improved with i5/OS V6R1

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To a certain way of thinking about it, the System i server is not an operating system running on a piece of hardware. It is a hybrid machine that runs a collection of operating systems (i5/OS, AIX, and Linux) running on Power processors. The box can also support other operating systems (Windows and Linux) on inboard or outboard System x servers that are all linked into the same storage infrastructure either under the skins of the server or attached to it through iSCSI adapters or Fibre Channel links to storage area networks. As part of the rollout of i5/OS V6R1

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• i5/OS V6R1 and Its Java Enhancements

  February 4, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last year, when IBM did a preview of V6R1, one of the things it talked about as a feature for the new operating system was much-improved Java performance using a new 64-bit Java Virtual Machine. This new JVM is distinct from the so-called classic 64-bit JVM, which IBM’s Rochester labs created many years ago for the platform. It is also distinct from the 32-bit JVM that IBM gave out as an alternative to customers who wanted peppier Java execution back in 2006 with i5/OS V5R4. As I suspected when IBM previewed this new 64-bit JVM last summer with the technology

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• Saving and Restoring External SQL Routine Definitions

  January 30, 2008 Hey, Mike

  A vendor whose software we use separates objects into two main libraries–a data library and an object library. I had to restore all the data, so I deleted the data library and restored it. After that, the application stopped working. The problem turned out to be that some stored procedures that they created in their data library got wiped out, and the Restore Library (RSTLIB) command didn’t put them back. The story ends happily because the vendor had a program in place for just such emergencies, but (and I’m sure IBM disagrees), I consider this a big old bug in

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• Create Multiple Directory Levels in One Swell Foop

  January 30, 2008 Hey, Professional

  Yes, you, the person who knows so much about making machinery serve your organization. You, the person who knows so many little, seemingly trivial and insignificant bits and pieces of information. Here’s a bit of info that maybe no one in your shop knows, and it can come in handy. It comes from the IT Jungle Web forums. Here’s the original question, after a bit of editing. During a payroll run, I need to create multiple directories (which will be subdirectories) that will contain various reports, for specific companies, for specific pay dates. The company directories already exist. For

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• User Storage Limits and Application Processing

  January 30, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  Every once in a while, I’ll run into a situation where for no apparent reason, a user can no longer run a process that either updates user-created System i data or creates an output file. The process will run fine one day and stop working the next day. After investigation, the problem usually has something to do with the user’s Maximum Storage Allowed (MAXSTG) parameter. The MAXSTG parameter is assigned to a user profile when that profile is created. Its mission is to tell the operating system how much auxiliary storage (in kilobytes) can be assigned to store permanent system

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