• SoftLanding Latest ISV To Add iASP Support

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The issue of whether to support independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) in your IBM i setup is not one to be taken lightly. For starters, just migrating from traditional ASPs to iASPs can be a major project, and your software will need to be tweaked to support it. While IBM i shops are moving to adopt iASPs, the growth is slow and steady rather than a mad dash. But for SoftLanding Systems, demand for iASPs was enough to justify modifying its change management tool, Turnover, to support the technology. iASPs debuted with the platform way back in 2001 with

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• Enough With The Huge Performance Increases Already, IBM i Pros Cry

  April 1, 2015 Swift

  IBM i shops are up in arms this week over the huge performance increases that IBM is seeking to foist upon them with the latest Power8 servers. “Eight threads per core and 12 cores per socket? Really IBM?” said clearly exasperated programmer/analyst Jack D. Sparrow. “I mean, what on earth am I going to do with all that raw, unbridled processing power?” Sparrow is not alone. In fact, a growing number of IBM i professionals are beginning to vocalize concerns about IBM and its sinister plan to equip every customer with a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower that will

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• Quadrant Simplifies Path To FoIP Glory

  April 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the biggest challenges in setting up a virtual fax over IP (FoIP) system is getting the telephony settings right. Screw up one of the dozens of settings in a typical install, and you’ll quickly be on the phone to tech support. With a new release of Quadrant Software‘s QuadraDocV FoIP software, the vendor added a graphical wizard that significantly simplifies the setup process. Quadrant launched QuadraDocV two years ago to provide a virtual FoIP solution, primarily for its large base of existing IBM i customers. As a replacement for its popular FastFax “black box” appliances, QuadraDocV installs

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• Handling Constraints Revisited

  March 31, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  I recently had an email from Doug, who was making use of some code I had published way back in February 2010 in my article Handling Constraint Violations in RPG. The article discussed how to trap a constraint violation caused by a WRITE/UPDATE/DELETE operation and, more importantly, how to determine the name of the constraint that caused the violation. Doug had come up with an instance where my code was not working! After going through the usual stages of denial, anger, and some expensive therapy, I read the rest of the email. Doug’s code worked fine with an RPG

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• Dynamic Lists In Static SQL Queries

  March 31, 2015 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted: We have an SQL query that can take from one to 13 two-byte codes that become part of an IN clause for row selection. We have no idea which codes they will need to see beforehand; it’s an interactive thing. We are using dynamic SQL. I would like to find a static solution. Any suggestions? –Harold Sure, Harold. I do this sort of thing from time to time, and I use static SQL to do it. Let’s say those two-byte codes are state abbreviations, like the state abbreviations we use in the USA. You probably have a form

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• RubyGems Are The Foundation Of Success

  March 31, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  In my previous article, I discussed a RubyGem named xmlservice but didn’t really dive into what Gems are, why they exist, and how we can use them to save a tremendous amount of time. That’s what this article is about. But before we dive into geekdom, it is worth digressing into a perspective I’ve gained by observing the top open-source-language camps. I often get asked “Why Ruby? Isn’t XYZ language more popular?” Usually the XYZ language is PHP or Java, as I think it is safe to say PHP is the most popular web language out there and Java

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• OpenPower Could Take IBM i To Hyperscale And Beyond

  March 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Years ago, back when the IBM i platform was called the iSeries and IBM had just caught the Linux bug pretty bad, many of us had the idea that IBM should open up the OS/400 operating system and let it be driven more directly by a community of end users. The idea was to emulate the open source community that had fostered the maturity of the Linux kernel and the many thousands of other projects that make their way into a Linux distribution. As it turns out, Big Blue is starting out with opening up the hardware and from the

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• IBM i Skills Shortage: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

  March 23, 2015 Dan Burger

  A month ago when IT Jungle reported that CEO Mike Lawrie was blaming a lack of IBM i skilled professionals for a revenue shortfall at Computer Sciences Corp, the volume on this topic has been turned up considerably. That’s good. This is a discussion that needs to be heard. In the just-released IBM i Marketplace Survey, half the respondents listed IBM i skills depletion as a top concern. Much of this discussion is defined by whether a shortage exists or whether companies are doing a poor job with workforce management. “There’s only a shortage if you need them and

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• Tributary Flashes Backup To 60 TB Per Hour

  March 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Flash storage is not something you will find in the typical IBM i shop, which doesn’t get all worked up over shiny new technologies. But if a recent test that that pitted an IBM i host against an IBM FlashSystem 840 storage array–with Tributary Systems‘ Storage Director 5.0 managing traffic in the middle–is a sign of things to come, then flash may be here sooner than you think. Storage Director is virtual tape library (VTL) software that’s typically installed on an X86 server. This VTL appliance appears to its various hosts (IBM i servers, mainframes, OpenVMS, NonStop, etc) as

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Innovators’ Droll Lemma

  March 23, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  Robert Samuelson got it right, and memorably so. Last June, the Washington Post columnist characterized a spat in print between two Harvard professors as “an intellectual food fight.” The fight is over the value of business professor Clayton Christensen‘s theory of disruptive innovation, and Christensen’s adversary is history and literature professor Jill Lepore. Christensen’s theory, right, wrong, or some of each, may help explain IBM’s perplexing situation, and arguments about it are undoubtedly underway at the top of IBM. And if they aren’t they ought to be. In Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he asserts

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