• The Case Of The IBM Systems Director And RBAC

  February 26, 2014 Jeff Waldbillig

  It was a dark night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. Actually, that was last night. Today was going to be a busy day working on the network that knew how to keep its secrets. I’d been temporarily moved from my nightshift role at the help desk to the daylight hours to cover for a coworker who was out with an extended illness, but I was beginning to wonder if my late-night auction surfing had attracted some attention I did not need. My phone rang, and I paused for a moment as I considered that this

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• The ADO Client Side Of Default Parameters And Named Arguments In DB2 For i

  February 26, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  In Stored Procedure Parameter Defaults And Named Arguments In DB2 For i, I covered two new related features in DB2 for i 7.1 that were implemented in Technology Refresh 5 (DB2 for i Group PTF Level 18 or higher). In this tip, I’m going to cover a surprising limitation of this feature when coding in an ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) environment, whether using an IBM DB2 OLE DB provider or the iSeries Access ODBC provider. Recall that stored procedure parameters now support a DEFAULT keyword that can be a literal, subquery, or expression (with limitations): CREATE PROCEDURE DEV.CREATE_ORDER (

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• Auto-Answering Record Lock Errors And More On Returning An IBM i Box

  February 26, 2014 Hey, Joe

  My Power i system is driving me crazy with RPG1218 record lock messages. Because of the way one of our applications was written, we receive RPG1218 messages several times a day. The record lock only lasts a minute. When we enter a retry on the locked record, the system is always able to update the record. Is there any way to auto-answer these record locks? –Bert Well the first thing I’d do is have your applications staff figure out why that program is causing so many record locks and fix it. (Ha.) Barring that, I may have a solution that

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• Intel’s Xeon E7 Brings The Fight To IBM’s Power8

  February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales of RISC and Itanium processors running Unix or proprietary operating systems such as IBM i, OpenVMS, NonStop, and others have been taking it on the chin in recent quarters, and with these businesses down, Intel has wound up a haymaker that puts even more pressure on these platforms. It is called the Xeon E7 v2, and an update of the Power processor can’t get here soon enough. Code-named “Ivy Bridge-EX,” the new chip from Intel is aimed predominantly at machines with four sockets or more, but there are also variants available for two-socket machines and both Silicon Graphics and

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• Fear Or Freedom: IBM i ERP Upgrades

  February 24, 2014 Dan Burger

  Major ERP implementations are like the footsteps of a giant. With each step the ground shakes and you can see terror in the eyes of everyone who feels the tremors. What if this thing fails? The path of destruction will be massive and the cost will be obscene. The fear of failing has stopped or postponed uncounted ERP upgrades. Fear can be a good thing. It can keep you alive, for instance. But it can also build confidence and inspire action. In the IBM midrange community, ERP software has been around for decades. Having a rock-solid software/hardware combination for business

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• Oracle To Make JDE More Agile, Less Painful To Upgrade

  February 24, 2014 Alex Woodie

  In a bid to make it easier for JD Edwards shops to upgrade their ERP systems, Oracle is moving its JD Edwards suites to a more agile product release cycle that emphasizes a continuous stream of product enhancements rather than periodic big-bang releases. The change in development cycle, which will impact both EnterpriseOne and World suites, was announced by Oracle at the recent JD Edwards Partners Summit, and corresponded with the release of JDE EnterpriseOne Tools version 9.1.4. Lyle Ekdhal, the group vice president of the JD Edwards business at Oracle, apparently discussed the new agile development cycle during his

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• As I See It: Peeking Under the Hood

  February 24, 2014 Victor Rozek

  There would have been no AS/400 without it; no iSeries or System i or Power Systems, no servers of any kind, and no cloud in which to assemble them. Without it, there would be no smartphones, no tablets, no Internet. In fact, without some advanced evolutionary form of it, we would probably still be trolling around the African savannah looking for food. The “it” refers to the three pounds of our neuroanatomy that are the source of all human progress and invention: the brain. If that was not immediately obvious, it is because (please forgive the pun) we don’t give

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• IBM Slashes On-Demand CPU And Memory Prices

  February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I said at the beginning of the year, I expect that IBM will start wheeling and dealing to boost sales of its Power Systems machines ahead of the delivery of shiny new Power8 systems sometime around the middle of the year or so. If you have one of the midrange or high-end Power Systems machines that have latent processor cores or main memory in the box that has not yet been activated, then Big Blue has a deal for you. With the Power Systems CUoD discount promotion, which you can see in announcement letter 314-021, IBM is slashing

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• IBM Cuts A PureFlex Deal With Service Providers

  February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Managed service providers who are looking to build public clouds based on Power Systems and X86 servers can now get PureFlex machines from IBM at a significantly reduced price. The discount deal, which is detailed in announcement letter 314-017, is similar to a deal IBM gave to MSPs back in December 2012 for various Power Systems machines, including Power-based blade servers. The BladeCenter machines are basically in mothballs now, and have been replaced by PureFlex converged infrastructure. And thus the new MSP deal is focused on PureFlex machinery and the systems software that runs on it. This includes both

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• Software And Storage Propel Avnet’s Q2

  February 24, 2014 Dan Burger

  The significance of IBM de-emphasizing hardware and investing more in software and services can be seen in the reseller channel. Just take a look at the most recent financial report from one of IBM’s largest channel partners: Avnet. Hardware sales, particularly servers, used to be a cash cow for the Technology Solutions group at Avnet. Back in the day, the master distributor sold AS/400s at a snow-shovels-in-Chicago pace. The revenue piled up like snow drifts. Avnet remains closely connected to a great number of AS/400, iSeries, and IBM i shops. But server revenues aren’t what they used to be.

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