• Java vs. .NET: Someone’s Going to Get a Black Eye

  August 18, 2008 Dan Burger

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A guy walks into a bar wearing a Microsoft .NET T-shirt and challenges any Java-loving pansy to fight. The place gets deathly quiet, and one guy in the back of the room slides his chair back from a table, stands up, and glares at the intruder. These kinds of encounters happen all the time, but by and large the combatants remain anonymous and the outcomes are quickly turned into folklore, with each side retelling the stories with their favorite programming environment superhero wailing the opponent into a bloody pulp. Well, get ready

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• Arrow and Avnet Say Their June Quarters Exceeded Expectations

  August 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With so much dicey news out there in the economy, you have to look high and low for a little good news. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel have been doing pretty well for themselves in recent quarters, but in a market where Microsoft is under pressure and Sun Microsystems can’t seem to right itself as Dell is making progress. And, as it turns out, so are the largest IT and electronics distributors in the world, Arrow Electronics and Avnet. Both companies, who are the two major master distributors for servers in the world, reported their financial results for

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• Magic Software Boosts Sales and Profits in Q2

  August 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Application tool and integration software provider Magic Software Enterprises continued to make progress on riding up the wave of legacy application modernization out there in the world, and reported record sales and profits in its second quarter ended June 30. Magic Software is based in Or Yehuda, Israel, but does a lot of its business in North America and Europe–particularly in OS/400, i5/OS, and i shops. So its own rise and fall is something of a barometer, loosely speaking, of what is going on out there in AS/400 land. Being a public company, as Magic Software is, allows us to

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• Kronos Says Business Is Still Growing, Profits More So

  August 18, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The one thing that happens when a company goes from being publicly held to private is that it has at least four fewer reasons to talk to the world about itself since the company doesn’t have to do the quarterly dance with Wall Street and the financial and trade press. But old habits die hard, and human resource and talent management software maker Kronos reported financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter, just because it can if it wants to and just to make a little noise for itself. There aren’t a lot of details, of course, because Kronos

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• Serving Up Spreadsheets

  August 13, 2008 Paul Tuohy

  Our users are always looking for information in different formats. They want to see it on a screen, in a report, in a PDF document, in an email, or in a spreadsheet. There are many ways of achieving all of these but most require third-party products or quite a bit of study to master a new programming technique. Well, there is a very easy way to generate the spreadsheets your users require using nothing more then Excel, RPG, CGIDEV2, and a little knowledge of XML (no experience required). Excel (as of Excel 2002, I believe) allows you to save a

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• V6R1 Enhancements for Run SQL Scripts

  August 13, 2008 Skip Marchesani

  Among the many enhancements that V6R1 provided for System i and i5/OS are several for Run SQL Scripts, which improve its function and broaden its usability. Run SQL Scripts is part of the Database function in System i Navigator. Save Script to System i Source File Prior to V6R1, scripts for Run SQL Scripts (a.k.a. SQL Script Center) could only be saved as PC files with a .SQL extension, either on a PC or on the System i IFS. Starting with V6R1, these script files can now be saved on the System i as a member in System i source

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• Admin Alert: Common Mistakes When Failing Over to a CBU

  August 13, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  My shop ran its first high availability failover test in 2007. We’ve since run many more tests where we configured two different System i 550 Capacity BackUp (CBU) units to impersonate other systems. We’ve also made many mistakes in the process. Today, I’m focusing on common CBU failover problems and how to avoid them. Hopefully, this information will help make your failover process run smoothly. Meet the CBU In the i5/OS world, a CBU system is a specially configured Power i, System i, or iSeries machine that communicates with your production machine to continuously replicate production data and applications using

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• Why Blade Servers Still Don’t Cut It, and How They Might

  August 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, a good idea just doesn’t take off. OK, this is information technology, not philosophy, so let me rephrase that more accurately. Sometimes, ideas and habits that were once laudable have an immense inertia that prevents a new and perhaps better idea from building momentum in the market; sometimes, a standard however begrudgingly adopted by IT vendors can overcome that inertia. Such is the case with the wonderful idea of blade servers. Every couple of years, the situation with blade servers boils my blood a little bit, like a squandered opportunity does for most of us. Here we are in

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• Power Systems Memory Prices Slashed to Promote Virtualization

  August 11, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While server makers are, generally speaking, pretty excited about server virtualization, their excitement is not just limited to the idea that the advent of sophisticated virtualization hypervisors and the efficiencies that consolidation affords compels customers to spend money on new gear when they might otherwise not spend anything at all. Server virtualization and the consolidation it allows also compels customers to buy beefier machines, ones with lots of processor, memory, and disk capacity, and I/O bandwidth. These are machines that are inherently more profitable than the little boxes sprawled all over the data center these days. Since the advent of

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• Database Modernization Still Unknown Territory

  August 11, 2008 Dan Burger

  Just because an IT manager is accustomed to flying in the face of convention doesn’t always mean there is a flight plan involved. And that’s not to say that the ranks of IT professionals are filled with high stakes gamblers, either. By and large, IT is a safe haven for the risk adverse. As an example, let’s take a look at the integrated database used by AS/400, iSeries, and System i users and compare it with what is considered a modern database. Who is ready to make the jump? The long accepted practice in the System i environment–which dates back

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