• IBM Opens Up Beta for PAVE Linux Runtime on Power Chips

  April 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM opened up a public beta testing cycle for an emulation product that it has created with a partner that will allow applications written for Linux on X86 and X64 processors to run on its Power-based System p servers running Linux. IBM quietly announced that it was working with Transitive, the company that created a very sophisticated emulation tool called QuickTransit and launched it for use by systems vendors in June 2005. QuickTransit is, for instance, a key piece of the “Rosetta” emulation environment that allowed Apple Computer to stop using Power processors from IBM and Motorola

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• Norwegian IT Reseller Buys Top Nordic System i5 Reseller

  April 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Consolidation in the IT industry is not just happening in the United States, and it is not only occurring in the software market. For instance, last week, a prominent System i5 reseller from Norway, the Ementor Group, acquired another reseller in the Nordic region, called Informatikk, for about 92 million Norwegian krone, or about $15.3 million at current exchange rates for the U.S. dollar. Informatikk has offices across the Nordic region, and is known as the dominant distributor of System i5 gear in the area of Europe. Specifically, Informatikk has 122 employees, who are located in offices in

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• Hitachi Boosts Enterprise-Class Hard Drives to 1 Terabyte

  April 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is just finally getting around to putting 70 GB and 141 GB SCSI disk drives in 3.5-inch form factors in as standard devices on the System i5 line, but the old IBM disk operations now owned and operated by Hitachi continues to kick out advanced disk technology that will hopefully–and quickly–find its way into the i5/OS platform. The most interesting of these–and one that I have been advocating to be used in the i5 platform, is the 2.5-inch SAS disk drive, the Ultrastar C10K147, which spins at 10K RPM and which has either 73 GB or 147 GB of

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• Relativity Technologies Grows Fast from Legacy Application Modernization

  April 30, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a rare day when a privately held software company gives the world a peek into their books, but legacy application modernization software vendor Relativity Technologies last week divulged a few morsels of its most recent financial results. Relativity is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has been in business for the past decade. Its core product, which is called Modernization Workbench, is used to take just about any kind of legacy application you can imagine–RPG, COBOL, PL1, Visual Basic, C and C++–and run it through a language parser that can break it down into business rules that can

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• What Can I Select When I Group?

  April 25, 2007 Dear highly esteemed professional colleague

  It’s not uncommon for someone to ask me for help with error SQL0122, which involves SQL commands that use the GROUP BY clause to produce summary figures. Since I see this error over and over and over, I thought it would be good to explain how summary queries work. The standard rule I hear is that the SELECT clause of summary queries can list aggregate fields (those in the GROUP BY clause), expressions that are in the GROUP BY clause, and column functions, such as COUNT, SUM, and AVG. That’s close, but slightly inaccurate. A reader who contacted me recently

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• To Shift or Not to Shift: That Is in the Fourth Parameter

  April 25, 2007 Ted Holt

  RPG’s %REPLACE function is marvelous. When I think of all those array-manipulation calcs I wrote in my System/34 and System/36 days, I could cry. Anyway, to use %REPLACE effectively, it is good to ask oneself a simple question: In the event that the replacement string and the string of characters that is being replaced are not the same length, do I, or do I not, want the characters that follow the replacement to shift? This is the same question SEU asks on the Find/Change Options panel. Informing SEU of your desire is an almost effortless matter of typing a Y

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• Admin Alert: Dealing with i5 Critical Storage Errors,

  April 25, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Part 1 Critical storage errors can occur whenever i5 hard drive usage passes 90 percent of available storage space. Above 90 percent, system performance starts to degrade. When storage usage breaches 95 percent, the system can become unstable and turn itself off or spontaneously reboot. While you can’t predict when critical storage errors will occur, there are several things you can do to detect and cleanup storage problems before they crash your system. What’s the Disk Facts, Jack? This week and next week, I’ll deal with the issues involved in monitoring and correcting critical storage errors or storage overflow conditions.

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• PowerTech Tools Build Trust By Decreasing Authority

  April 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  It’s 7 p.m., and all your users are supposed to be logged off the system, but do you know where your security officer is? While you trust your security officer to hold the keys to the i5/OS kingdom, today’s regulatory environment simply doesn’t permit all-powerful users to traverse corporate IT systems unseen and unmonitored. A new release of PowerTech Group‘s AuthorityBroker gives i5/OS shops the capability to monitor the monitors, and get back into the good graces of the auditors. AuthorityBroker helps i5/OS and OS/400 shops lessen the need for users to run with profiles granting them special authorities,

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• IBM Expects Speedier Portal Projects

  April 24, 2007 Dan Burger

  Long implementation timeframes have plagued portal projects since this technology became widely available. That’s not to say that companies are unable to successfully deploy portals. IBM and other portal software companies have documented numerous achievements. However, portals have yet to gain widespread acceptance, and the burden of prolonged implementation has been a factor. Some of that responsibility rests with the complexity of the software and some of it rests on companies’ failure to have a clear business plan. IBM’s WebSphere Portal product development group is currently shining the light on ease of implementation, knowing that this is the origin of

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• BSafe Introduces Cross-Platform Auditing

  April 24, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Companies that run multiple types of servers are faced with special challenges when it comes to collecting log data, normalizing the information, and generating audit reports. Auditing is bad enough with a single server, but the difficulties are compounded when the data resides across disparate systems. Security software vendor Bsafe Information Systems has addressed this challenge with Bsafe Enterprise Security version 5.5, which enables companies to run audit reports across i5/OS, Linux, mainframe, and Windows servers from a single screen. There are some pretty big changes coming to Bsafe Enterprise Security. This product, which was introduced about two years ago

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