• Top Five New Technologies On IBM i

  June 29, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the great things about the IBM i server is it adapts to the times. While the platform often gets tagged with the “legacy” name, that’s merely because there’s still a lot of vintage iron running antique software in the real world. But the little elves way up north in IBM‘s Rochester toyshop have been hard at work bringing new capabilities to the platform. Here are the top five new things that IBM brought to the IBM i platform in 2014 and 2015: 1. Native Flash Storage IBM added support for native flash storage in the latest round

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• Advice From The Mavens Of Modernization

  June 29, 2015 Dan Burger

  You don’t have to stretch your IBM midrange imagination too far to understand that today’s app dev decisions will have a great impact on tomorrow’s IT success. Some things never change. And that’s one of them. But situations change and doing business changes. The trick is to integrate the past–keep the valuable experiences and toss the excess baggage–with the present to prepare for the future. Technology is almost always disruptive. How you deal with that, how you make it work for your career success and the success of your organization is the on-going challenge until you decide to hang up

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• Take A Peek Inside PurePower Converged Systems

  June 29, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When IBM sold off the System x division to Lenovo Group, one of the things that went with it was the modular Flex System chassis. Yes, IBM said it would source the machines from Lenovo and, yes, IBM said that it would continue to make and sell Power-based nodes for the Flex Systems to make its PureApplication converged systems for those customers who want them. But the fact that there are, a year after the Power8 chips first came to market, no Flex System nodes based on the Power8 speaks volumes about just how IBM is really thinking about

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• Infor Readies IBM i Cloud

  June 29, 2015 Dan Burger

  ERP in the cloud . . . would you go for such an idea or not? If Infor didn’t think some IBM midrange shops were ready, it wouldn’t be offering this option to its discrete manufacturing customers. Infor’s Cloud Suite has been available to customers on other platforms for more than a year. We’re about to see how its IBM i shops take to the cloud. The official announcement of Infor’s Cloud Suite for IBM i is still several weeks away, but the company already has a few shops operating in the cloud. At a gathering of Infor XA, LX,

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• Reader Feedback On The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT

  June 29, 2015 Hey, TPM

  It’s unreal how often I keep bumping into you. I was intrigued by the title of the article in the attached note, followed these links, and again found an article by you. (And thanks for the reference.) I’ve shared your emotions about IBM and this system, with ever increasing sadness, from the inside. Still, you laid down a challenge and that reminded me of something I was asked to review by an IBM friend named Phil Vitale. He asked me to review and comment on a paper he had read named The CHERI capability model: Revisiting RISC in an age

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• iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

  June 25, 2015 Susan Gantner

  Followers of my Guru tips know that I’m an RSE (a.k.a. RDi) fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RSE’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know how it is: the more you use a toolset and come to depend on all the great things it can do you for you, the more you also begin to come up with thoughts like but I sure wish it could do X. . .. One of the great things about RDi (and its predecessors, RDP and WDSC) is

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• The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT

  June 22, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The collective brain trust here at IT Jungle expends a lot of its intellectual and emotional energy on watching the ecosystem of customers who use the progeny of the venerable AS/400. Many of you have been using IBM midrange systems since the days of the launch of the System/38 back in the late 1970s and you have been long-time users of the systems for nearly a decade when the AS/400 made its debut on June 21, 1988, and when this platform made good on the name International Business Machines. You will have to forgive me for still being in

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• Western User Groups Attempting A Comeback

  June 22, 2015 Dan Burger

  Here it is, the top three things most unlikely to be seen in the IBM midrange community: Frank Soltis wearing a beanie with a propeller on top; Big Blue handing over IBM i to the open source community; and a freshly minted IBM i user group. The first two are pretty much out of the question, but the last scenario, I’m here to tell you, is happening not once, not twice, but three times. And you thought pigs would fly before a new local user group would put out a welcome mat. We don’t keep birth rate statistics on IBM

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• Audit Time: How Do Your Source And Objects Match Up?

  June 22, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When an auditor comes into your IBM i shop, chances are good he will check that processes are in place to control source code. But all too often, your underlying source code will not match up correctly with the program objects that actually run in production, indicating a process problem. A free new tool from Rocket Software called iAudit is designed to help IBM i shops identify this divergence of source code and object before the auditor comes around. Regulatory audits are once again on the rise. Whereas the Sarbanes-Oxley Act enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal at

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• Mad Dog 21/21: If It Ducks Like A Quack

  June 22, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  Yale has many impressive graduates, including Eli Whitney, who declared, “Keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off my gin.” The university has also wrapped sheepskin around less admirable characters, including a father and son who conned first America and then Britain into trusting their wrongheaded but likely heartfelt beliefs. We are, of course, referring to Elisha and Benjamin Perkins, doctors who promoted quack medical apparatus. Their saga shows what a minefield medicine can be, even for a great institution like Yale. And then there’s the colchicine story. Dr. Watson of IBM, mind the gaps! The former fame and subsequent

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