• As I See It: Reviewing Performance Reviews

  November 9, 2020 Victor Rozek

  I started working at the age of 15 for a ship chandler on the San Francisco docks. Like many entry-level blue-collar positions, there wasn’t any talk of job descriptions or performance expectations. Basically, some burly guy told me what to do, and I did it.

  Over the ensuing decades, however, I’ve had a goodly number of white-collar jobs replete with detailed job descriptions, project goals, and deadlines, all anchored by the assurance of regular performance evaluations. None of it materialized exactly as advertised. In a dynamic, rapidly changing environment, what you end up doing is often not precisely what you …

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• Additions To The Db2 Web Query Family

  November 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air for Db2 Web Query, the primary business intelligence tool for IBM i environments from Big Blue. Earlier this year, IBM launched two new versions of the product, and this fall, IBM delivered version 2.3 of the product. Finally, there’s been a change of ownership of the third-party company behind the software.

  Let’s start with the change in ownership. Last month, TIBCO Software announced its intent to acquire Information Builders, the privately held New York City business intelligence software company that Gerald Cohen founded way back in 1975. IBI’s primary product is WebFOCUS, which forms …

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• IBM Pulls Plug on Systems Magazine, Pushes Community Site

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM Systems magazine will cease publishing at the end of 2020, ending a two-decade-plus run as an IBM-backed magazine serving the IBM i, AIX, and System z communities, IBM announced this week. In its place, Big Blue plans to ramp up the IBM Community website, which, you will remember, absorbed the old developerWorks content earlier this year.

  IBM Systems Magazine has been produced by MSP TechMedia, a division of MSP Communications, under a license from IBM. The media partnership between the two companies, which has been ongoing for at least 22 years, included two magazines: the monthly IBM Systems …

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• Grafana Provides a Visualization Option for IBM i Metrics

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Today’s IT professional needs to stay informed on what’s happening across a slew of systems, including storage and CPU utilization. Having a platform-neutral system to visualize all these metrics is important, and one of the most widely used open source observability platforms today is a project called Grafana.

  Grafana was originally developed back in 2014 by a developer at Orbitz to be a front-end for Graphite, which another Orbitz developer created years earlier for capturing and storing time-series data generated by a wide array of servers, storage systems, applications, and other pieces of IT gear.

  Eventually, the creators decided that …

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• IBM Delivered An RDi Update, Too

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Next week, IBM is planning to deliver the PTFs that include the functionality contained in the Technology Refreshes it just unveiled for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last month. You will want to stay on the lookout for those updates. But some of the capabilities that IBM “announced” in the TRs shipped months ago, including those for Rational Developer for i (RDi).

  The latest release of RDi, or version 9.6.0.8, was included as a feature for IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR4. IBM, of course, announced those TRs on October 6 and says it plans to …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 4

  November 4, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  IT Jungle readers are familiar with the writing style of our fearless leader, and editor in chief, Timothy Prickett Morgan. Next week, on November 10, you can actually hear him in action as he moderates a live discussion panel for Eradani with IBM i users who share their success stories. Tim is an entertaining host so it’s worth your time to listen in. You can find the listing below in our Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings section. Also, COMMON members don’t miss out Top Story below for info on the appreciation celebration planned for next week.

  Top Stories

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 44

  November 4, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  You may or may not be aware of this news so it is worth sharing: there is a new version of Access Client Services that is due in the first week of December this year. And, a final reminder that the new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 are going to be available on November 13, and so will the Tech Refresh Resaves related to them.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.1:

  • Nothing here.

  New …

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• Racksquared Is Another Option For IBM i Private Cloud

  November 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for a private cloud to run their IBM i applications may want to check out Racksquared. The Columbus, Ohio-based managed services provider rents Power and IBM i resources to its clients, who, the company says, turn to it because of the increasing difficulty in finding IBM i expertise.

  Racksquared was founded in 2011 when a 118-year-old restaurant supply distributor called the Wasserstrom Company spun out its IT department into a separate entity. Wasserstrom had outgrown the server room at its headquarters, so it bought and renovated an old AT&T Wireless data center in downtown …

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• You Can Save Money And Get More Performance At The Same Time

  November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we had a chat with John Richards, vice president of Global Asset Recovery Services, the part of IBM that sells certified pre-owned Power Systems, IBM Z and data storage, as well as parts and features, for these devices and is arguably the largest supplier of such equipment in the market. We talked very generally about the differences between the used (sometimes called second-hand) and certified pre-owned (often abbreviated to CPO) markets for Power Systems, and how this market has changed over time, but still can provide significant value to customers – and at a …

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• Cloud Walkers Updates IBM i Partition Manager, Slashes Prices

  November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All over the world, a lot of things are taking a bit longer to get done these days thanks to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But things are still getting done, and that is the main thing. So it is with Bartlomiej Grabowski, the founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Walkers, the startup based in Prague in the Czech Republic who released a tool called LPARKit, which we covered at its V1 release back in December 2019.

  The plan, Grabowski tells The Four Hundred, was to take all of the input from the V1 users …

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