• UCG Launches VAULT400 Reports

  July 30, 2013 Alex Woodie

  United Computer Group this month launched VAULT400 Reports, a new offering that will give VAULT400 customers access to reports that detail the state of their backups and storage utilization on the VAULT400 cloud. UCG last week mailed out notices to its VAULT400 customers to let them know about the new service and to provide them with security credentials to log onto the VAULT400 Web portal. The reports will be available to VAULT400 customers at any time, and the company will email the reports every quarter. UCG is making three sets of reports available to its customers. The Backup Status report

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• Maxava Customer Installs HA Software Just In Time

  July 30, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It didn’t take long for Smith Brothers Stores to realize a return on its investment in Maxava‘s high availability (HA) software. Just two weeks after going live on Maxava Enterprise+, the UK-based industrial supply company leaned heavily on the software to save it from a potentially devastating situation. Smith Brothers Stores sells a range of products to construction firms in the UK, including pipes, fittings, valves, HVAC equipment, tools, and other items. The 116-year-old company sells its products from nine locations across the country, as well as through an e-commerce website. Supporting the 100-person business is the IBM i-based

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• Focus on Network Security Overlooks Importance of Protecting Data, Oracle Study Finds

  July 30, 2013 Alex Woodie

  In a new study commissioned by Oracle, researchers found that more than two-thirds of a typical organization’s IT security resources are allocated to protecting the network layer, leaving less than one-quarter of the resources to address the security needs of core infrastructure components, such as servers, applications, and databases. The study involved more than 110 companies that were contacted by CSO Custom Solutions Group on behalf of Oracle. The study asked the companies how they allocate their resources, including money and staff time, to address security concerns. Despite the fact that a breach of a database would be potentially

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• SafeNet Claims Usage-Based Licensing Breakthrough For On-Premise ISVs

  July 30, 2013 Alex Woodie

  For the last several years, the software licensing experts at SafeNet have helped software as a service (SaaS) vendors sell their stuff based on what features their customers use and how often they use them. With a recent update to its Sentinel Cloud license management and software monetization offering for software publishers, SafeNet says it can now provide on-premise software vendors with access to the same usage-based licensing and pricing capabilities as their SaaS cohorts have enjoyed. Sentinel Cloud was originally developed for SaaS vendors, but the need for a usage-based pricing model for ISVs who sell on-premise software was

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• Control The Flow Of Stored Procedure Result Sets

  July 24, 2013 Hey, Mike

  I have an RPG program (defined as an SQL external stored procedure) that returns a data structure array as a result set. When this procedure is called from iNavigator, I can see the result set. But in our .NET client/server environment, the result set is not returned to the .NET program. Further, the .NET program first calls a “setup” stored procedure that establishes the library list and general environment settings. Thereafter this “setup” procedure calls the RPG program that returns the result set. The RPG program runs upon request from the .NET world but no result set is returned. –B.C.

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• Value An Expression? *YES!

  July 24, 2013 Ted Holt

  I find it ironic that the most commonly used CL command suffers from an annoying (if not aggravating) limitation that does not afflict many less-used commands. Fortunately, the commands you and I write do not have to have this limitation. The command to which I refer is CALL. The limitation is that the parameters must be literals or variables, never expressions. To see what I mean, look at this CALL command. call somepgm parm(%sst(&Data 5 4)) Doesn’t that make sense to you? The first parameter consists of bytes 5 through 8 of a variable named &DATA. The compiler complains, expressing

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• Automatically Answering IBM i Unable To Allocate Record Messages

  July 24, 2013 Hey, Joe

  We have a persistent problem with application jobs waiting on record locks with an RNQ1218 (unable to allocate a record in file &7) message. The record is only temporarily locked because by the time my help desk looks at it, the lock is gone and the program resumes after answering the message with an ‘R’ (Retry). Any ideas what we can do so we’re not constantly answering record lock messages? –Bob In your case, the first thing is to determine why a constantly needed record is always being locked and to devise a fix. This could be a case where

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• IBM’s Systems Biz Returns To Profitability In Q2

  July 22, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue had a tough first quarter, but things got a little bit better in the second three months of 2013 and the company’s top brass are feeling pretty good about the prospects for business in the second half of this year. This is the picture that IBM is painting despite some rough currency fluctuations that do not play in its favor and continuing difficulties in the RISC/Unix and X86 server segments. And there is tough competition in the storage business, too. In the quarter ended in June, IBM once again did not grow its revenues and once again focused,

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• RPG Teams Picking Up Mobile Development Skills

  July 22, 2013 Dan Burger

  Finding mobile development skills on an RPG development team is sort of like finding a homemade lemonade stand on a hot summer day in Cleveland. They’re out there. They’re a welcome relief. But they are rare. Not as rare as they used to be, however. And the numbers are growing quite nicely. I have not seen any mobile developer guesstimates for RPGers, but the mobile projects keep multiplying and there is little reason to believe the projects won’t increase in quantity and quality for years to come. How are IBM midrange shops handling this and how will they handle it

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• As I See It: Searching for the Perfect Question

  July 22, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Lying to get a job used to be a lot easier. There was a time when a fluffed-up resume was enough to get you an interview. A proper display of earnestness, a dash of personal charm, and a retelling of your exaggerated accomplishments would pretty much guarantee that you could keep living indoors. Back then, resume claims were seldom checked, and what checking occurred was not very useful. By law, companies could only verify employment, and unless you could cajole someone into speaking off the record, you learned nothing illuminating about the applicant. At the end of the day, hiring

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