• IBM i Shops Walking A Flatter Upgrade Path In 2020?

  January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In general, there is a rough correlation between growth in online transaction processing workloads and related enterprise applications, and the growth in the overall economy. At some point in the past, when OLTP was relatively new and many companies were still doing batch processing, OLTP workloads grew many times faster than gross domestic product – much as many data analytics, storage, and machine learning workloads are doing today.

  So when we see that IBM i shops are looking to upgrade in 2020 at a much higher level than we would expect based on historical and anecdotal trends, it gets our …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

  January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.

  For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.

  “IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …

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• Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 6 – The New Object Table Gets Even Better

  January 20, 2020 Susan Gantner

  RDi V9.6 seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. I started this series about this release of RDi almost two years ago. You may have thought my last (fifth) tip in the series was the last on this subject, but it turns out there’s still more!

  I wrote an entire tip earlier on the new and greatly improved Object Table view. In a related tip, when discussing the PDM perspective, I said that I thought there were a few enhancements still needed to make the perspective a good tool for easing the transition from PDM for RDi …

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• Unperspective: Are We There Yet?

  January 20, 2020 Trevor Perry

  I recently drove a 26-foot truck – with my car on a trailer behind – more than 1,700 miles across America. The journey took four days and 42 hours on the road, with several stops for fuel for the truck and myself. When you have that much time to focus on one thing – driving, your brain has a lot of time to ponder the world.

  While I listened to some branding audiobooks and engaged in the occasional screaming loud sing-alongs, I learned a few lessons. As I was dictating them into my notes app, I realized that many of …

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• Reality Reflects IBM i, Which Reflects It Back

  January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the fullness of time, the datacenters of IBM i shops will reflect the trends in the overall IT sector and in the respective industries and IT scale of their peers who have other back-end systems of record and a mix of systems of engagement. Give or take.

  That’s why we pay attention to the larger trends going on in the IT sector. The IBM i base may be coming a little slowly to true cloud compute, storage, and networking capacity, but it is getting there finally thanks to the efforts of IBM, Connectria, Skytap/Microsoft, Google, and others.

  It takes …

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• Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

  HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …

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• Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.

  IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …

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• SoftLanding Turbo Charges IBM i Disk Utility

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Data storage volumes are doubling every 12 to 18 months for the average organization, which means it’s more important than ever to keep on top of production storage resources. On the IBM i platform, a new release of the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems should help organizations monitor disk usage.

  Regular maintenance of production storage environments is critical to ensuring smooth operations. On the IBM i server, where disk storage and memory combine to form one single-level storage pool accessible by programs, it’s perhaps even more critical to keep DASD below a certain utilization threshold (usually about 85 percent). …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 15

  January 15, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Welcome back! For many of us, this is the first real work week of the new year, full of possibilities and ambitions as we steam ahead into 2020. But just because 2019 is now in the rearview doesn’t mean we can’t take a look back at what a year it was. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie recently revisited the biggest IBM i stories of last year, and it’s a fun read and reminder of all that happened during our previous trip around the sun. For a peek into the future, don’t miss IT Jungle editor in chief Timothy Prickett Morgan …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 2

  January 15, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  As you well know, there is an issue with LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, and what it means is that a guest partition created with Virtual Partition Manager (VPM) inside SST or Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) will hang on IPL after the apply of the TRs. This gets real elaborate, so we strongly suggest you review …

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