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  • IBM Does More Deals to Move Iron

    May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The price cutting and tweaking on hardware by IBM for gear relating to its Power Systems boxes continued last week.

    Most importantly, Big Blue cut the prices it charges on selected feature conversions in its Power 595 line, and some of the price cuts were pretty dramatic, obviously intended to make it more likely that customers with these big iron boxes spend a little money rather than waiting for the next budget cycle. Here’s the details on the price changes, complete with the feature conversion descriptions that IBM never gives in its announcement letters:

    Machine From To List Price Price
    …

    Read more
  • Distributors Arrow and Avnet Deal with the Meltdown

    May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The server makers of the world have all been slammed by the economic downturn, and by definition that means that their distributor partners are having a tough time, too. But all things considered, they seem to be holding up pretty well.

    IBM‘s two master resellers, and the ones who do the selling downstream to myriad resellers who in turn interface with customers, are Arrow Electronics and Avnet. Let’s take at look at their most recent financials in alphabetical order so there’s no fighting here on the pages of The Four Hundred between these fierce and long-time rivals.

    In

    …

    Read more
  • Ready for an Attitude Adjustment? Visit YiPs Sandbox and Try webERP

    May 26, 2009 Dan Burger

    You don’t hear people dismissing open source software as a fad, a farce, or an IT freak of nature so much these days. Open source used to be a topic that enterprise systems administrators would joke about. It’s not so funny, and it’s not so freakish, anymore. And that’s not to say the switch to open source software has been flipped to the ON position. This is an evolutionary process and it has evolved to the point that acceptability is much more widespread than it was even a year ago, let alone three or four years ago.

    A week ago,

    …

    Read more
  • COMMON Europe Needs Your Input on Top i Concerns

    May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Back on April 27, just as the COMMON midrange conference and expo was underway in Reno, Nevada, I told you that COMMON Europe, its European counterpart, was undertaking two surveys to try to gather up input from the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i community to try to influence the decisions that IBM is making about the i platform.

    You can–and should–take the i Top Concerns survey of AS/400, iSeries, System i, and Power Systems i shops, which is open to all i shops, not just those located in Europe; the online form is here in Deutsch,

    …

    Read more
  • Faster Fetching

    May 20, 2009 Hey, Ted

    When using embedded SQL to read data, I have the option of retrieving one row or multiple rows with one fetch. Does fetching more than one row at a time improve program performance?

    –Neil

    I’d like to think it does, Neil. It seems to me it should. Here are the comments of John, a reader who claims that a multiple-row fetch is appreciably faster.

    I have used fetch with multiple-occurrence data structures in order to read multiple records at once and minimize the use of FETCH in the program. The execution of a FETCH is quite resource intensive and slow.

    …

    Read more
  • A Bevy of BIFs: %Dec to the Rescue

    May 20, 2009 Susan Gantner

    More and more in RPG applications these days, it seems we need to process data that comes from “the dark side.” Translation: from a non-i system. This data could be coming from a browser screen via an RPG CGI program, from a CSV (comma-separated values) flat file, from an XML document, or myriad other ways. One thing these dark sources often have in common is that data that should be numeric often isn’t–at least not by RPG’s definition. So common is the issue of invalid numeric data that one of the recommendations from IBM on using the XML-INTO operation code

    …

    Read more
  • Admin Alert: Four Ways to Encrypt i5/OS Backups, Part 2

    May 20, 2009 Joe Hertvik

    In the last Admin Alert, I started discussing four techniques for encrypting i5/OS backups for greater protection and to satisfy auditors and government agencies. Last week, I focused on software techniques. This week, I’ll turn my attention to hardware-based encryption techniques. I’ll look at what options are available when you purchase specific hardware for your system and how those devices affect your backup strategies.

    What Hath Come Before

    As I explained last week, you generally have four options to encrypt backup media from your i5/OS systems.

    1. Software encryption through IBM‘s Backup Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) licensed program (i5/OS
    …

    Read more
  • Profound Logic Aims to Simplify Menu Navigation with Atrium

    May 20, 2009 Alex Woodie

    One of the drawbacks of 5250 applications is the menu layout that users must learn to navigate. To accomplish certain tasks, such as checking on the status of a customer order, a user may have to drill through a dozen screens. System i application modernization vendor Profound Logic is hoping to simplify this maze of menus with Atrium, a new Web portal unveiled at last week’s COMMON conference that gives users one-click access to specific screens. The vendor also introduced a new video blog.

    Currently in beta, Atrium will provide a central repository for all of the applications that a

    …

    Read more
  • Gresham Targets System i Shops with VTL Solution

    May 19, 2009 Alex Woodie

    One of the vendors displaying at the COMMON conference for the first time last month was Gresham Enterprise Storage, an Austin, Texas, business that develops and sells a virtual tape library (VTL) appliance called Clareti Storage Director. Gresham recently installed the Clareti storage appliance at its first System i shop, and now the company is building its business in the System i marketplace, which is ripe for more VTL options besides FalconStor, officials with Gresham say.

    Clareti Storage Director was developed in-house by Gresham Enterprise Storage, which is the U.S. arm of Gresham Computing, a U.K. company

    …

    Read more
  • PowerTech Says AS/400 Shops Still Flying in Security Danger Zone

    May 19, 2009 Dan Burger

    Security negligence is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if your IT projects are leading edge or whether IT has been in status quo mode since Frank Soltis was a pup. Security flaws can bring you to your knees quicker than plugging in an electric fan while standing a bucket of water. And the difference between being security smart and security stupid is just about as obvious. It’s not the IBM AS/400. It’s the way you use it.

    The way you don’t use it more accurately describes this appalling level of carelessness. Apparently there are no questions on the IT

    …

    Read more

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