• Incentives For IBM’s Missouri Facility Scrutinized

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM opened its state-of-the-art Information Technology Service Delivery Center in Columbia, Missouri, in October 2010. At that time, IBM publicized it would create up to 800 jobs by the end of 2012. That’s the kind of news any city would welcome these days. And these types of things just don’t drop out of the sky. Cities and states woo corporations to their locations with offers of tax incentives and real estate deals. Of course cities and states are working with public money. And the public expects transparency in how its money–many millions of dollars–is being spent and what is guaranteed

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• IBM Tech Conferences Feature Power, Hot Technologies

  February 25, 2013 Dan Burger

  IBM has three big technical conferences coming up in the next three months: one specifically for Power Systems, while the other two will take on strategies and best practices for all the hot technologies including mobile, social, big data, and cloud. The conferences begin with Pulse2013, which begins next week, March 3 to 6, in Las Vegas. IBM anticipates attendance to hit 8,000 and has put together an agenda of more than 450 technical training sessions, hands-on labs, skill certifications, and product demonstrations. The four educational tracks, sort of mini-conferences within Pulse, are Cloud and IT Optimization, Smarter Assets

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• Manta Offers Free Student Reference Guides To Students

  February 25, 2013 Jenny Thomas

  Most of us have adapted to the new and improved paperless way of life. Heck, many of you out there have led the charge to rid your company of wasteful pages that must be filed in favor of electronic documentation and storage. But you’re not alone if you wouldn’t mind seeing a good, old-fashioned hard copy every now and then. Budget cutbacks and rising costs have forced companies into eliminating expensive luxuries like paper, printers, and ink, but it’s not just about doing away with endless print jobs. The online world has many resources available. We get our news more

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• Stored Procedure Parameter Defaults And Named Arguments In DB2 For i

  February 20, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  Starting with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 5, DB2 for i stored procedure parameters support a default value, and the CALL statement supports named arguments. (DB2 for i Group PTF Level 18 or higher provides this new functionality). These simple and related enhancements can have surprising benefits for code comprehension and code maintenance. Let’s look at creating a procedure with one or more parameters having a default value: CREATE PROCEDURE DEV.CREATE_ORDER ( IN @CUSTOMER_ID INT, IN @ORDER_DATE DATE DEFAULT CURRENT_DATE, IN @ORDER_ID INTEGER DEFAULT (NEXT VALUE for DATALIB.ORDER_ID_SEQUENCE) , IN @ORDER_SOURCE VARCHAR(10) DEFAULT 'WEB') LANGUAGE SQL BEGIN … END

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• New CL String-Handling Functions

  February 20, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here. I love it when IBM enhances CL. When I hear of a new feature, my first thought is, “What can I do with this?” My mind has been spinning since Guy Vig first told me about CL’s new string-handling functions a few weeks ago. Let me tell you about these functions and some of the uses for them that have already occurred to me. First, here are a few facts you need to be aware of: IBM delivered the new functions in two PTFs: SI49061 and SI48166.

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• Getting Short-Term Maintenance For Your Power i Machine

  February 20, 2013 Hey, Joe

  I purchased a three-year maintenance contract when I bought my Power7 machine in 2010. The contract runs out in May but I need extended maintenance through July when I’m installing a new machine and returning the old machine to the leasing company. How do I extend my hardware/software maintenance for only two months without having to buy a one-year maintenance contract? –Jean This is a fairly common situation and one that IBM provides an out for in their maintenance contracts. Here’s how you can sign a one- or multi-year maintenance contract for your existing machine and then cancel the contract

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• PowerHA Installs Exceed 2,000 Globally, IBM Says

  February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  More than 2,000 customers around the world are using PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i, says Steve Finnes, IBM‘s worldwide product offering manager for PowerHA on AIX and IBM i. And with new HA capabilities for small and midsize businesses arriving with the IBM i 7.1 TR6 release of the software, the number of customers running PowerHA on smaller systems like the Power 720 is likely to grow. PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i is one product, but it actually refers to a variety of protection schemes that utilize different data replication mechanisms and are aimed at companies of varying sizes.

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• PowerTech Shines a Light on ‘Black Hole’ Commands

  February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Despite all the auditing and journaling functions in the IBM i OS, it’s still possible for a user to issue commands without accountability. For example, when users start an interactive SQL session, they are basically invisible to the administrator until the session ends. To help thwart this black hole of liability, PowerTech has added a new feature to Authority Broker that uses screenshots of the 5250 session to all track activity, regardless of the tool they’re using. PowerTech’s Authority Broker enables security administrators to temporarily grant users and programmers special authorities, such as ALLOBJ and SECADM, so they can perform

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• Vision Launches Cloud Initiative for RaaS

  February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Vision Solutions last week unveiled new software and licensing models that should make it easier for public cloud providers to offer Vision’s disaster recovery and high availability solutions to Power and X86 customers. For Power customers, a key element of Vision’s new cloud strategy is metered billing for MIMIX, which Vision says will streamline licensing and billing in a cloud environment, to provide recovery as a service (RaaS). Vision is no cloud newbie. In fact, its software has been running for at least a decade in the data centers of managed service providers (MSPs) to provide failover protection for their

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• Cilasoft Monitors Additional Exit Points with IBM i Security Tool

  February 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i security software developer Cilasoft last week unveiled enhancements to two of its products, including CONTROLER, its exit point monitoring solution, and EAM, its Elevated Authority Manager solution. Cilasoft says the capability to monitor two additional exit points in CONTROLER–the open database file and socket exit points–as well as new commands in the tool, will give IBM i shops a powerful new way to enforce data-centric security policies, which it claims is “an enormous breakthrough.” CONTROLER is a network security tool that monitors and controls all inbound and outbound activity going through the various exit points that IBM built

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