• Time For IBM i To Catch Mono–Again

  June 6, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just after Attachmate‘s takeover of Novell and just before it did the breaking of that company into two divisions, SUSE selling Linux and Novell selling everything else, Attachmate told the people working on the open source Mono project they were no longer needed at the company. But it is a lot harder to kill an open source project than taking away techie paychecks, and a new project has sprung up to carry on the Mono work. Mono, of course, is a project founded by Miguel de Icaza, whose is one of the bigwigs behind the Gnome user interface for

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• Red Hat Revs Enterprise Linux To 6.1

  June 6, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has announced the first update to its Enterprise Linux 6 operating system. The RHEL 6.1 update comes six months after the major upgrade to the 6.0 version, and Tim Burke, vice president of Linux engineering, tells me that in addition to the 314 updated packages and 49 new packages that were rolled up in the 6.1 update, the Linux 2.6.32 kernel has been tweaked to support a whole slew of new hardware that is coming down the pike later this year and early next. Burke could not be explicit about what hardware has been added

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• IBM Adds SupportLine for Power Systems Blades

  June 6, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I would have assumed that Power Systems blade servers slapped into BladeCenter blade server enclosures had SupportLine hand-holding from IBM, but apparently not. Or rather more precisely, they do now. In announcement letter 611-013, IBM extended the Hardware Maintenance Services (product number 6950-95A) to augment that hardware support. To put it in plain English (or rather American), SupportLine is one of the things that makes a Power blade setup an AS/400 and not just an RS/6000. SupportLine for Power Systems BladeCenter is a remote support option (presumably delivered out of IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, facility for the Americas region)

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• Finding Duplicate Rows in a Name and Address Table

  May 25, 2011 Skip Marchesani

  Many companies still use the U.S. Postal Service to mail promotional and marketing materials to existing and potential customers. With rising printing expenses and postal rates, it’s important to minimize waste by identifying and eliminating duplicate rows in name and address tables. However, these tables can present some interesting challenges. For instance, the following two addresses are duplicates, but how do you identify them as potential duplicate rows? John Sampson Dickerson Mutual Ins. 218 Bridge St., Suite 257 New York, NY 12345 John Samson Dickerson Insurance 218 Bridge Street NYC, NY 12345 Companies can write their own software, which has

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• Asserting the Ostensibly Unassertable

  May 25, 2011 Hey, Ted

  Assertions are great for validating conditions that can be tested with IF, DOW, SELECT, etc., but what about other types of conditions? For instance, can I use an assertion to test that a variable contains valid decimal data? –A Nice Lady (I’m sorry. A nice lady asked me this question in person and I forgot her name.) Yes, it is possible to check for conditions that one cannot test with conditional OPCODES such as IF, but you must use a different method. When something goes amiss, the system loads a five-digit, zoned-decimal status code with a non-zero value. You can

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• Admin Alert: Other Options for a Post-Upgrade Backup

  May 25, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  In an earlier column, I wrote about how administrators can save time after an i operating system upgrade by performing a Save System (SAVSYS) backup instead of a full system save. Several readers wrote in with more information and system information backup tips. Let’s look at what they had to say about post-upgrade backups and what we can learn from them. A Better Post-Upgrade Backup Strategy Pete Massiello of iTech Solutions wrote in with the best suggestion for post-upgrade backups when he said: I perform many upgrades, and I tell my customers that the best option, if time permits,

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• SAP Unveils HANA for In-Memory BI

  May 24, 2011 Alex Woodie

  SAP customers who need real-time analysis of their transactional data may want to take a look at HANA, the new in-memory business intelligence (BI) software officially announced at the ERP giant’s annual SAPPHIRE user conference last week. The offering, which includes software that’s pre-configured to run on hardware from partners like IBM, is said to provide a big shot in the arm for production reporting, with deployment in as few as six weeks. In-memory databases have become popular over the last few years for analytic and reporting workloads due to their simpler implementations, lighter hardware requirements, and cost savings

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• SafeData Cloud Runs IBM i DR and Production Workloads

  May 24, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Data Storage Corp. (DSC) last week unveiled SafeData Cloud, a new IBM i, AIX, and Windows cloud offering. The new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering will enable customers to run not only their IBM i or Windows disaster recovery (DR) workloads, but also their everyday production workloads, providing another outsourcing options for organizations that don’t want the hassle of running their own hardware. SafeData, which was bought by DSC last June, has traditionally been associated with online backups and hosted DR and high availability (HA). The company used electronic vaulting software from i365 and HA replication software from

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• Multifunction Printer Workflow and Document Design Get inFORM’s Attention

  May 24, 2011 Dan Burger

  Document production and distribution specialist inFORM Decisions has expanded its multifunction printer support on the IBM i server along with updating its data mapping tool for reports, forms, checks, and other business documents. During the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earlier this month, inFORM president Dan Forster provided IT Jungle with an overview of his company’s developments. With the increasing popularity of multifunction printers (print, fax, copy, email, and scan capabilities in one machine), Forster was most eager to talk about inFORM Decisions’ iDriver 3.0, which expands on the limited support of MFP devices that is

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• IBM i Push Pays for Financials Specialist UNIT4 CODA

  May 24, 2011 Alex Woodie

  UNIT4 CODA made a big splash at the recent COMMON conference in Minneapolis. The developer of advanced financial software, which was one of only two pure application vendors at the show, used the venue to showcase its 25-year history supporting the IBM i platform, as well as its alliance with fellow Oracle-slayer, IBM. CODA Financials may not be a household word in the IBM i world. It doesn’t present a picture or an idea in your mind the same way that “JD Edwards” (gold-standard ERP) or “Dr. Frank Soltis” (grandfather of the AS/400) do. But the size and

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