• Applications Misfire When Database Integrity Ignored

  September 24, 2012 Dan Burger

  By the time the cow is out of the barn, it’s too late to close the door. For many companies, including those in the IBM midrange community, applications that have served well for many years with patches and fixes are needing attention just like that barn door. The choice between proactive and reactive problem solving is one way of looking at the situation. The choice between application-centric development and data-centric development also awaits. Just about every IBM i shop is engaged in application-centric development, which is both good and bad. Application development is the engine that drives business and can

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• As I See It: Legacy

  September 24, 2012 Victor Rozek

  It was shaping up to be a near-perfect day, except for that not-so-small matter of the dead horse. It began as the big finish to a busy summer; a trip to the Wallowas (Oregon’s mini-version of the Swiss Alps) to visit a friend and, ostensibly, to spend a little time in the mountains. Personally, I love mountains with a yearning that borders on the irrational, and I hadn’t had my fill of the high country this year, so I was eager and impatient to hit the trail. The morning after we arrived, I stood outside in the crisp early-autumn air,

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• Top CIOs Bring Home The Bacon, IT Salaries Flat As Pancakes

  September 24, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Corrected: With the prices of gas, food, and energy all on the rise, an annual salary with six zeros in it could take a lot of pressure off the average American. It sounds outrageous, but that’s the range for the top chief information officers at some big corporations. The top salaries from 2011, the last year for which data is available, were recently revealed by Janco, a management consulting firm that monitors the IT job market. While the annual salaries on the list of the top CIO earners would be like winning the lottery for those of us toiling

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• Reader Feedback On Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hi, Tim: Looking at the iSeries 515 option you mentioned in Can My Power 520 Run IBM i 7.1, And Do It Well? Don’t forget that unless it has V7R1 with it, you have an after-license fee and a year’s Software Maintenance to buy to get it to V7R1. The existing system can be used as a donor to transfer across licensed programs, but if it has Software Maintenance then it can get to V7R1 for just the hardware cost. If the maintenance is about to expire then order the upgrade before it does! –Richard P.S. 515s are good boxes;

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• Put Your Data Center Feeds Into The Flex System TCO Tool

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to figure out the pros and cons of moving to a new server, on both the technical and economic fronts, is difficult enough. Trying to assess the cost and benefits of moving to a new system architecture is even more complex. But that is what IBM wants customers to do in making the leap from Power Systems and System x boxes to “Project Troy” Pure Systems modular machines. That’s why IBM has gone back to partner Alinean to gin up a return-on-investment and first-pass capacity planning tool to help you figure out how to convert your Power and X86

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• Oracle Still Struggling With Systems, But Hanging In There

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t know the meaning of the word regret, and despite the shrinking systems business in the wake of the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.6 billion in January 2010, Ellison and Company are determined to make a real systems business out of this. And to their credit, they are doing a better job than Sun was doing by itself. In Oracle’s first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in August, the company posted revenues of $8.18 billion, down 2 percent and shy of Wall Street expectations. But thanks to cost controls, Oracle brought just

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• Gartner Says Public Clouds Puffing Faster Than Expected

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The public cloud is huffing and puffing itself up and is trying to blow the IT distribution business down. According to a new projection from Gartner, the myriad kinds of public cloudy services available on the market today will account for $109 billion worldwide. That is up 19.6 percent from 2011’s global public cloud revenues, and higher than the 12 percent growth Gartner was forecasting in prior prognostications. “The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” explained Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be

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• IBM Offers Freebie SmartCloud Slices–Again

  September 24, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue really, really, really wants you to try out its SmartCloud public cloud, and to try to get you hooked on the idea of IBM managing your infrastructure for you, the company is giving away freebie slices on the SmartCloud in various geographies. The promotion is running on IBM’s website, and has been spotted in recent weeks in various announcement letters in smaller geographies. And it is the SmartCloud Enterprise variant with 64-bit and 32-bit X86 processors, which have been virtualized and can be set up to run Microsoft‘s Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Red Hat Enterprise

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• The New Basics: Indicators

  September 19, 2012 Jon Paris

  The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were introduced to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs. RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need

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• OSHA Changes To IBM Battery Handling Affect Cache Battery Replacement

  September 19, 2012 Hey, Joe

  I’m scheduling cache battery replacement for my production machine. Since this machine is never off-line, do you have any best practices or recommendations for how to change these batteries while production is running? –Ben Due to a recent United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) change, changing the cache batteries on your IBM i partitions isn’t as easy as it used to be, especially on a production machine. Here’s what happened. IBM uses batteries in its disk controllers to provide disk drive caching. The batteries have a useful life of about 2.75 to 3 years and the system will

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