• As I See It: All Things Big

  March 25, 2013 Victor Rozek

  Many years ago, 60 Minutes did a segment on the Israeli Air Force. At the time, the United States had just sold the Israelis a handful of our latest jet fighters and 60 Minutes wanted to see how Israeli pilots were using their new toys. Turns out they had made a number of low-tech modifications (some classified), which the Israelis believed would make the planes more user friendly. For one thing, they installed an inexpensive rear-view mirror so that the pilot could track enemy aircraft without turning his head. The reporter also asked about the vast array of gauges, flashing

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• IBM i Cloud Watch

  March 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  Who’s to say that small to midsize companies are ready to move their IT infrastructure off premise to the cloud where it will be managed by people on someone else’s payroll? I can name one person who would. His name is Jay Johnson and he’s vice president of managed services for Sirius Computer Solutions, IBM‘s largest business partner. His managed services program is built around Power Systems and is primarily focused on the IBM i user base. Last fall, Sirius rolled out a cloud computing program (part of, but separate from, managed services) because it thought the time

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• Analytic Skills Is The Top Big Data Priority, Lavastorm Says

  March 25, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The concept of “big data” came into vogue a few years back as organizations began adopting new ways to deal with the increase in data volume, variability, and velocity. But according to a new survey conducted by toolmaker Lavastorm Analytics, the biggest analytics investments organizations are planning to make in the coming years are aimed at educating and training people, as a shortage in analytic skills looms. The term big data is fairly new, but the concept is not. By most accounts, the amount of data generated in world has been increasing at an exponential rate for quite a

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• IBM Rejiggers V5 Rebate Deal, Includes PS Blades And Power7+ Entries

  March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the entry Power7+ systems shipping and the PS7XX series of blades using Power7 chips being the last of their line, it comes as no surprise that IBM has tweaked an on-again, off-again Power7 rebate deal. The rebate deal aims to get customers using earlier generations of Power Systems iron with any of the releases in OS/400, i5/OS, IBM i V5 to move up to new Power7 iron and either IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. The last time this deal was updated was back in June 2012, when IBM put out a rule saying that with this rebate

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• Storage Sales Swell Despite Compression, Thin Provisioning, And Dedupe

  March 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the best efforts of storage array makers to make their gear less wasteful in terms of capacity, companies keep buying storage both inside their server skins and outside in external arrays like there is no tomorrow. And the amount of capacity that companies are consuming is growing at near historical levels before various kinds of technologies, such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, data compression, and other features were added to arrays to try to curb the appetite for gigabytes. In the final quarter of the year, according to market research from IDC, worldwide disk capacity shipped in the quarter

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• Toronto Tech Conference An Educational Achievement

  March 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  Successful IBM i tech conferences depend on a couple of key performance indicators. First of all, there has to be attention to the right topics and speakers and secondly there must be a core group of volunteers who are dedicated to getting the conference done right. The Toronto User Group (TUG) consistently scores high with its annual Technical Education Conference (TEC), which this year is scheduled for April 25 and 26 in Toronto. There are good reasons for this. The user group has education professionals that are prominent and they put an emphasis on education that is evident with the

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• Manta Releases More COBOL Courses

  March 25, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  It was just last year when Bill Hansen, president of Manta Technologies achieved his long-time goal of introducing a COBOL training series for programming students. COBOL was the one training course Hansen said customers consistently asked for over the years, so he was pleased to add it to Manta’s curriculum. Now comes the addition of two more courses to the COBOL series: Performing Arithmetic in COBOL and COBOL Table Processing. The curriculum already includes Developing a COBOL Program, COBOL Output Programming, and COBOL Input Programming, which we told you about last year. The two new

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• Tips For Using RDP’s DDS Designer

  March 20, 2013 Susan Gantner

  In my Guru tip on the DDS Designer in Rational Developer for Power Systems, I showed you the basics of using the DDS Designer to create or maintain screens. A few changes have been made to the DDS Design tool in recent releases of RDP, and I’ve also had a bit more experience with it. So I decided it was time for an update on the topic. The most obvious change that has happened in recent releases is that the DDS Design perspective can now automatically be opened on a double-click of a DSPF or PRTF source member. You

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• Using SQL Joins With Tree Structures

  March 20, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. The reason tree structures are important to me is not that they are so numerous, but that I use them every day. I don’t write programs to process tree structures every day, but many of the programs I have written still run every day. For that reason, I must know fast ways to extract data from tree structures. One such method is the SQL join. This article is a rewrite of the topic “Efficient Database Retrieval” from my article Recursion and the Alternatives, which I wrote eight

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• Using Incremental IFS Backup To Speed Up Backup Time

  March 20, 2013 Hey, Joe

  Is there a trick to speeding up AS/400 Integrated File System (IFS) nightly backups? My nightly backups run over 300 minutes and 120 of those minutes are tied to the IFS backup, so it runs into production hours. Here’s the Save (SAV) command I’m using to backup the IFS. SAV DEV('/QSYS.LIB/TAP01.DEVD') OBJ(('/*') + ('/QSYS.LIB' *OMIT) ('/QDLS' *OMIT)) + SAVACT(*SYNC) ENDOPT(*UNLOAD) + UPDHST(*YES) DTACPR(*DEV) — C To cut down on IFS backup times, you can modify your backups to perform a full IFS backup once a week and an incremental backup the other nights of the week. Here’s how this works.

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