• As I See It: Barry, Barry Bad

  July 25, 2011 Victor Rozek

  More often than not, ethical behavior seems to be determined by distance–either real or virtual. The Internet provides a daily reminder that the more removed an offender is from the outcomes he creates, the more emboldened he becomes. And the corollary is also true: The more remote the victim, the easier it is to harm her. Stealing an old woman’s money from the safety of Nigeria is easier than mugging her in Des Moines. Technology offers criminals, the mean-spirited, and what Hannibal Lecter described as “the free-range rude,” a high degree of immunity from discovery and retaliation. It’s as if

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• Infor Shares Development Plans for Lawson M3

  July 25, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Users of Lawson Software‘s M3 suite are getting Infor‘s new SharePoint-based Workspace user interface, and ION, a Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB), the ERP giant announced last week. Conversely, Infor plans to adopt some of Lawson’s products and technology for its existing offerings, including its Smart Office interface, Mashup Designer, and Enterprise Search options. Infor bolstered its already-dominant position in the IBM i enterprise software space with its $1.83 billion purchase of Lawson, one of the few remaining large ERP software houses that cater to midmarket and enterprise customers. While both of Lawson’s flagship ERP products–the M3 and

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• IBM i 7.1 Leads OS Shipments, Pushes Entry Sales

  July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The second quarter was not just a good one for IBM‘s Power Systems server sales. It was a good one for the latest-greatest incarnation of the OS/400 operating system and database platform, known as IBM i 7.1. Back in May, when the editorial team at IT Jungle–Dan Burger, Alex Woodie, and myself–attended the COMMON midrange conference in Minneapolis, we met with the top brass in the Power Systems organization. They told us that in the first quarter of the year, there were a few companies making the jump from i5/OS V5R4 directly to IBM i 7.1, but that

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• IBM Has A Fire Sale on BNT Rack Switches

  July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I guess that IBM has a bunch of Gigabit Ethernet switches sitting in the barn and it wants to get rid of them real bad before the end of the year without having to make any sales calls to get the job done. Last week, in announcement letter 311-101, Big Blue, which is now a network equipment maker thanks to last year’s acquisition of Blade Network Technologies for an estimated $400 million, slashed the price on one of its top-of-rack switches. Specifically, IBM chopped the price on the RackSwitch G8052, a 1U rack-based switch with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports

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• Database Revenues on the Rise, So Sayeth the Tracker

  July 25, 2011 Jenny Thomas

  The database market is expected to perform well in 2011, according to a new report from IDC. Current IDC projections for relational database management systems, or RDBMSes in the proper lingo for databases, added to data integration and access software that works in conjunction with databases, show that these combined categories will show 6.5 percent growth this year, hitting $33.9 billion. This follows a solid performance in the second half of 2010, when the market achieved year-over-year growth of 6.7 percent on revenues of $15.9 billion. If you do the math on the data released by IDC, then the

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• Big Blue Doesn’t Compete Against i Cloud Backup Vendors

  July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The midrange is a mouthy bunch, and we spend a lot of time telling IBM what it should do and what it should not do. Just for a change of pace, I want to point out something that Big Blue has not done and show you why this is a good thing. Last week, in announcement letter 611-007, the company talked about its plan to offer the SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery on its SmartCloud compute and storage clouds. As the name suggests, this is a full managed service that allows companies to fail-over their workloads running on Windows or

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• INSERT to Overlay Positions in a Character String

  July 20, 2011 Skip Marchesani

  In V5R3, IBM simplified the manipulation of character stings with the implementation of the INSERT and REPLACE functions in SQL. INSERT allows the positional insertion of one or more characters into a string and REPLACE scans for all occurrences of a target string and overlays or replaces the target string with a replace string. This article will discuss INSERT, and a future article will discuss REPLACE. Prior to the implementation of INSERT in V5R3, the positional insertion or update of one or more characters (alpha or numeric) in a character string was a challenge. You had to create a compound

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• Emulate RPG’s Pessimistic Locking in SQL

  July 20, 2011 Hey, Mike

  I’m writing a Java program to replace several RPG programs that access unjournaled database files. The current programs all use the same logic: obtain a lock on a record, allow the user to make zero or more changes on various “screens,” then save the changes (potentially not changing anything). I need to make my Java program behave like the original RPG programs. I have always been able to use SQL, but no transactions, due to the lack of journaling. I thought I found a solution today, but it didn’t work as I implemented it. I tried setting the isolation level

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• Admin Alert: Porting an Image Catalog Between Power i Boxes using FTP

  July 20, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In a recent article about creating and using image catalogs in lieu of CDs and DVDs for i operating system installations and upgrades, I didn’t discuss how to move image catalogs between different i/OS partitions that can be located many miles or time zones apart. To plug that hole, this issue I present two simple programs that enable you to move pre-loaded image catalogs between systems. Why Move Image Catalogs? For many organizations, their iSeries, System i, and Power i partitions may reside in different cities, states, or even countries. The production system frequently resides in one location while its

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• Still Wanted: A Power-i System of Systems

  July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is all about “smarter systems” and “workload optimized systems” these days in its marketing, and as far as I can tell, in the past two years the company has not done anything to bring the kinds of focused design it has for supercomputing and mainframe shops, just to name two, to bear on the Power Systems/IBM i base. And I think the company is missing a big opportunity to re-engage in a big way with those midrange customers. What got me to thinking about this, of course, was last week’s launch by Big Blue of the mini mainframe called

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