April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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If you are looking for the latest technical dope on the Power7-based Power Systems servers, then you will be happy to know that IBM has just updated its Redbook and Redpaper technical library to include new technologies announced last fall. Here’s a list of the latest Power Systems Redpapers, which came out on March 22: |
March 28, 2012 Paul Tuohy
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Believe it or not, there are a few features of RSE that I do not use on a daily basis. When working on my own system, my own projects, and my own development environment, I know where everything is and how to navigate it. But (and I know you are going to find this hard to believe) there are some people who do not share my views on such things as where sources should be kept and, even more shockingly, I have to adapt to their standards when I am working on their systems. Is there no justice? Here are |
March 28, 2012 Ted Holt
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ACME Software has just released version 1.0 of the DWIM (Do What I Mean) utility. Placing the DWIM command in your CL programs (or calling the program counterpart from programs written in other languages) will solve all your problems, because the computer will stop doing what you tell it to do and do what you intended for it to do instead. Before you start adding calls to DWIM to your programs, you might want to ponder a few questions.
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March 28, 2012 Hey, Joe
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Our management has our operators apply cumulative PTFs (CUME) with no regard to when the system will be IPLed. They load the CUME, and the system may not be IPLed until a few weeks later. The managers believe that no PTFs are applied until after the IPL. I think that some PTFs are applied immediately, while others wait for the IPL. What’s the real story on how PTFs are applied? –Dave This is an interesting question. For most shops, PTFs aren’t usually applied until you IPL the system. But in some situations, eligible CUME PTFs can be applied immediately, depending |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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International Presence, the original developers of the TeleFax/400 software sold by IBM for many years, recently launched CloudFax/400. The new hosted fax offering enables IBM i customers to get rid of in-house fax servers and nests of telephone lines, and instead access the vendor’s fax services over the Internet, without any programming on the IBM i server. The vendor also launched IMPScloud, a pure cloud fax offering for customers not afraid to re-program their fax-to-ERP integration. Fax is in the midst of a major transition away from reliance on analog phone lines and toward digital fax delivery using IP. |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Vision Solutions may not have found the secret sauce that forces IBM i and AIX to lose the grumpiness and finally play nicely together in the same Power Systems sandbox. But when it comes to matters of high availability, the vendor will no longer tolerate any OS detachment that costs time in serious situations. With yesterday’s updates to MIMIX and Double-Take, administrators now have a single graphical user interface to monitor and manage critical HA processes occurring in both IBM i and AIX. While AIX isn’t popular among midrange IBM i shops, a good number of larger companies run the |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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IBM i shops should see a boost of speed in their Web application development projects with the latest release of the Valence development toolset from CNX. Valence 3.1 introduces new members of the Nitro family of products to its IBM i customers, most notably the Nitro App Builder, which lets users build simple JavaScript dashboards without any coding. “It’s like training wheels for RPG programmers jumping into Web development,” a company spokesman says. Valence is a collection of software for developing modern Web 2.0 and mobile applications that run on the IBM i platform and its Apache-powered Web |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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InterForm next month will begin delivery of the Spring 2012 release of its InterForm/400 document management system, which is called ArtForm/400 in the United States. Major new features with the Spring 2012 release include better compression of PDF output, capability to electronically input PDF files into the IBM i-based software, and input support for PNG and GIF images. InterForm develops a suite of IBM i document management solutions that’s used at 3,100 sites around the world, including large European customers like DHL, Porsche, GlaxoSmithKline, and Boehringer Ingelheim. American customers may know the Danish company’s software as ArtForm/400, a change necessitated |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Baker College’s IBM i applications now look a little younger and a lot cooler as a result of an application modernization project that was recently completed with Profound Logic‘s tools. The revamp of the UI might just have saved the IBM i from being scrapped for another platform. Baker College of Michigan is a longtime (and mostly happy) user of the IBM i platform. The college, which serves 43,000 students across 17 physical campuses and the Web, uses the computer platform to run a variety of critical applications. Over the several decades of use, the college has more than |
March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie
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Maxava has more than 150 customers accessing its IBM i high availability (HA) software from a cloud provider, the company said last week. The revelation demonstrates the high level of growth that’s occurring in the HA cloud market. A cloud-based high availability service makes perfect sense for organizations that can’t justify the purchase of a second IBM i server or the additional care and feeding that an HA application requires. By tapping into an HA cloud, an organization can utilize the cloud provider’s shared resources–including hardware, software, and skills–at a substantially lower investment point than if the organization tried to |
