The Four Hundred Archives - Page 671 of 1505

IBM Fights Performance Anxiety on Power Systems

November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you currently use the Performance Management iSeries service, IBM is replacing it with a new set of performance monitoring services that span both IBM i and AIX platforms.

In announcement letter 611-050 from November 15, just after we went on Thanksgiving holiday hiatus at The Four Hundred, IBM replaced the different iSeries and pSeries services with a single, unified Performance Management for Power Systems service. The older Performance Management iSeries service, which was part of IBM’s umbrella Operational Support Services, are withdrawn immediately. IBM will support you with the new combined service until your existing contract term comes

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NULL and NOT IN

November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

No matter who you are, there’s always something you can learn. In Much Ado about Nothing: Interesting Facts about Null, I presented a good bit of information about null values in database tables. Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble upon something I did not know about nulls.

It started innocently enough. I was surfing the Web and happened upon a link to an article entitled Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes. I couldn’t click the link fast enough.

I found a very well-written article by Plamen Ratchev. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but Ratchev wrote about

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Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names!

November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

Sometimes I find out that something useful has been available to me for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. Then I feel like a moron. Today I’m telling you that a certain DB2 for i feature has been around for decades, and you’re probably not using it. However, there’s no need to feel like a moron.

The feature of which I speak is the database ALIAS. As you well know, DB2 for i, in its native architecture, permits database column (field) names of up to 10 characters. That’s certainly better than the six-character limit for identifiers in

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Putting Your i System in Semi-Restricted State

November 16, 2011 Hey, Joe

We need to put one of our i partitions in restricted state where no applications are running. However, we also need TCP/IP to be up while the system is down, so that we can download PTFs and some software upgrades while our third-party packages aren’t in use. Is there a way to put our system in a semi-restricted state where we can only use our system console and TCP/IP communications?

–Mike

Yes, there is. And it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Here’s the drill.

First, make sure all your users are off the system. Then, make sure that all your batch

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PlanetJ Unveils Free Edition of IBM i Web App Dev Tool

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

PlanetJ recently announced a free community version of WOW, its Web application development framework for IBM i and other servers. The free version gives any IBM i shop the capability to build read-only interfaces to their existing RPG or COBOL applications, and to do so fairly quickly. The announcement marks a change in business strategy for PlanetJ, which is looking to boost its profile and get its solutions in the hands of more IBM i customers.

WOW (Web Object Wizard) is a model-based rapid application development tool and runtime that excels at delivering data-driven Web interfaces to existing applications and

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RVI and Quadrant Debut Remote Signature Capture for iPads

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Real Vision Software (RVI) and Quadrant Software this week are unveiling a new iOS and IBM i-based signature capture solution that dramatically reduces the time it takes to log a signature–such as proof of delivery–into an IBM i application. The offering, which combines RVI software that turns an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch into a signature capture device and Quadrant’s IBM i-based document management software, enables users to send bills electronically within minutes of capturing a signature.

RVI employees looked into signature capture technology at the urging of a couple of customers who use its IBM i-based document imaging software,

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NGS Updates IBM i-Based BI Suite

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

New Generation Software last week unveiled a new release of NGS-IQ, its suite of reporting and business intelligence tools for the IBM i server. The vendor has enhanced several aspects of the NGS-IQ suite with version 7.l, including better formatting of reports for mobile phones and tablets, new charting and drill-down capabilities, and a new query search feature that should make it easier for developers to find stuff they’ve already built in NGS-IQ.

NGS-IQ is a large suite of IBM i- and Windows-based BI and reporting software that’s used by a reported 25,000 IBM i users around the world. The

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Quantum Boosts Disk Array and Tape Library Capacity

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Quantum today announced it’s boosted the capacity of its largest DXi-Series disk array and de-duplication device to 320 TB, giving customers a 60 percent increase in total storage. The company also unveiled an upgraded iScalar tape library that features dual robotics and a secret compartment for hiding tape archives that won’t get customers dinged on application license fees. Quantum’s latest stuff is available to IBM i shops through its recently renewed partnership with Tributary Systems.

Quantum is battling market leader Data Domain for a share of the data de-duplication market, which is valued somewhere between $2 billion and $3

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Best Buy to Acquire IBM i Cloud Provider mindSHIFT

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Electronics retailer Best Buy is about to get into the IBM i cloud business. Last week the $50 billion company announced its intent to buy mindSHIFT Technologies, a Massachusetts-based managed service provider (MSP) that has hosted IBM i servers for several years, and launched a public IBM i cloud offering in 2010. The $167 million deal would give Best Buy entry into the burgeoning MSP market for small and midsize companies–and give the Geek Squad some green-screen cred.

mindSHIFT Technologies provides cloud services, data center services, and professional services to more than 5,400 clients and 25,000 desktops in the

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Crossroads to Debut StrongBox, an LTFS-Based Archive

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Crossroads Systems next month will begin selling StrongBox, a new storage solution that combines the large capacities and long-term storage capabilities of tape with the quick accessibility of disk. The solution, which is built on the linear tape file system (LTFS) technology that debuted with LTO 5, doesn’t support native IBM i data, but could still make it into the data centers of IBM i shops.

LTFS was one of the pleasant surprises that debuted over a year ago when the LTO Consortium released the specs for the fifth generation of the Linear Tape-Open format. LTFS is a self-describing tape

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