• Ten Practices for 2010 Your CFO Will Love

  January 4, 2010 Irwin Teodoro

  I have nothing against a chief financial officer. Being CFO is a tough position with a lot of pressures that can easily be misunderstood. That being said, it is the money people who generally stand in the way of engineers and technologists and the spending required to accomplish great things with IT. It is a common problem we all have–dealing with accounting, the CFO, or other non-IT management. Of course, our running joke is the CFO thinks of technology as a $499 PC they can pick up at Staples or OfficeMax. CFOs don’t understand why $29 billion is collectively used

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• Reader Feedback on Sundry

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Four Hundred Stories As the year was ending, we had a few stories in The Four Hundred that caused readers to crack their fingers and hit that Contact button at the top of the page. Here’s what they had to say about what we had to say. Reader Feedback on Power Systems i: Thinking Inside the Box and Abacus Offers i 6.1 Upgrade Virtual Test Drive Service Hey, TPM: From your article: “I was grousing in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred that the program conversion process that IBM is forcing customers to go through to move to the

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• Companies Look to Add Jobs in 2010, Inside IT and Out

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As The Four Hundred reported a month ago, the U.S. economy stopped hemorrhaging jobs in November and the unemployment rate actually went down a smidgen and could do it again when the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out its jobs report for December. And it looks like business in general and their IT departments in particular are getting ready to add some jobs. Let’s start generally and work our way into the IT part of the jobs market. If you take a gander at the latest quarterly economic survey from the Business Roundtable, which is comprised of

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• Disk Array Sales Continue to Recover in Q3, Storage Software Struggles

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you the rundown on Gartner‘s casing of sales of external, controller-based disk array sales in the third quarter of 2009, and in this issue, we present IDC‘s take on disk arrays for the quarter. The way IDC dices and slices the data, you can get a feel for how external arrays (which attach to servers through Fibre Channel, iSCSI, converged storage-server Ethernet or InfiniBand, or other means) are doing as well as internal arrays, which are generally based on PCI-Express RAID disk adapters tucked into the servers.

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• Security Advice for 2010: Trust No One

  January 4, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Not everything is at it appears. While this should be a no-brainer for anybody venturing onto the Web, this little piece of advice will pay higher dividends in the new year, according to security experts, who say cybercriminals are increasingly preying on people’s misplaced trust in each other and popular Web sites. This advice applies especially to hot technologies, such as social networking and smart phone users, but also anybody who uses search engines, clicks on Internet ads, or sits in front a Mac they thought was safe. Social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Wave,

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• Five Candidates Chase Three COMMON Board Seats

  January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since last fall, COMMON, the midrange user group that is trying to expand beyond its AS/400 base to encompass AIX and Linux users on Power Systems boxes, has been looking for some new board members to replace three members that are due to vacate their positions later this spring. Over the holiday break, COMMON announced that the nominating committee has approved a slate of five candidates for the three open positions on the board of directors. The five candidates are: Jeff Carey, Pete Helgren, Kevin Mort, Jim Oberholtzer, and Ron Pilcher. In the coming months, COMMON will give each

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• Encouraging Mere Mortals

  December 16, 2009 Hey, Ted

  You’ve got to be kidding, right? I’ve generally thought you were trying to show better approaches for coding issues. Are you advocating falling back to bad fixed-format techniques? The only conclusion that makes sense is that you’re testing the waters to see if anyone’s paying attention. Or just trying to drum up traffic to your site. What about a data structure that would have performed the split? Or an EVAL operation using built-in functions to convert to character format, substring it, then convert it back to the decimal fields? Both of those wouldn’t rely on the “magic smoke” multiply and

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• Miscellaneous Comments from Readers

  December 16, 2009 Ted Holt

  Dear Esteemed Colleagues: One of the best parts of writing for this newsletter is hearing from the readers. Whether what you write is laudatory or not, I appreciate your wisdom and your willingness to share it with me, and I regret that I’m not able to answer every email I receive. To end the year, here are some of your comments, with my replies or comments in italics, for the benefit of fellow readers. –Ted Hey, Ted: Thanks for the maze article. I enjoyed reading every part of it. It reminded me that a maze is a curled tree

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• When i5/OS Backups Keep You Waiting

  December 16, 2009 Hey, Joe

  We recently watched our month-end backup drag on forever. Occasionally, a job log message would appear saying that an object was in use and couldn’t be opened. Do the i5/OS backup commands “wait” on locked objects? Does that mean if several objects are in use, the backup wastes time waiting, or does it save other objects until it times out waiting for the locked items? –Mike Mike went on to say that he understood his system shouldn’t be locking objects when he’s performing a month-end backup, but his suspicion is that the locked objects are log files from various third-party

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• Data Masking Tool from Camouflage Now Supports DB2/400

  December 15, 2009 Alex Woodie

  System i shops that are concerned about the security of their sensitive data when it’s in the hands of outside developers should take a look at a data masking tool that recently became available from Camouflage Software. With the version 3.6 release of Camouflage Enterprise, the Canadian company is now able to obscure data stored in DB2/400, giving System i shops another weapon in their battle to protect personally identifiable customer data, and avoid the wrath of regulators. If IBM‘s recent acquisition of Guardium is any indication, database security is a big concern for Fortune 500 companies. While

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