• IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

  IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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• Midrange Dynamics Dives Into REST With Acquisition

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Change management specialist Midrange Dynamics this month announced that it has acquired Rest4i, the UK-based developer of a native IBM i framework for integrating RPG and SQL applications with REST-based APIs. The move positions Midrange Dynamics as a player in the rapidly evolving world of microservices.

  Rest4i was founded several years ago by Stuart Milligan, who headed up DB2 database modernization firm Databorough before selling it to Fresche Solutions (then Fresche Legacy) back in 2013. Milligan foresaw the coming wave of microservices and developed software to “turn the IBM i into a complete REST API server and the RPG developers …

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• LANSA Revs Low-Code, UI Modernization Tools

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is under new ownership, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing down the delivery of software, as the company has shipped a pair of product updates for IBM i and other platforms in recent months. That includes a new release of Visual LANSA, its flagship low-code development environment, and aXes, its screen modernization tool for 5250 apps.

  In July, LANSA announced a new release of aXes, its tactical modernization tool for converting 5250 applications into Web interfaces. aXes, which LANSA acquired 10 years ago, provides a way for IBM i shops to convert 5250 screens on-the-fly without any …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 2

  October 2, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Each week, it seems like we point to far too many articles about data breaches and other types of cybercrime. So this week it is nice to be able to direct your attention to some positive news on the cybercrime front. IBM has launched a program to help cities learn how to protect citizens and businesses from those criminals lurking in the interweb. In the first article below, you can read more about a new project IBM has started with the City of Los Angeles better prepare and defend against cyberattacks. It’s a step in the right direction for getting …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 39

  October 2, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First up in this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there is a new Security Bulletin for multiple vulnerabilities in Node.js that affect the IBM i operating system. See this link here for details. There are not PTFs for these vulnerabilities as yet, so just install the latest RPM of Node.js as a precaution.

  What else is new this week? We have added a “Prtr Links” tab to guide, so check it out. Our thanks to Bryce out in Portland for this recommendation.

  New (or Updated) Links this week:

  • JAVA: Using WRKJVMJOB to Dump JVM Data on the IBM i

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• Power9 Prime Previews Future Power10 Memory Boost

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Customers who are deploying Linux on Power Systems iron from Big Blue are about to get a very substantial boost in memory bandwidth as IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9’ (that’s a prime symbol, not an apostrophe or a typo, after the 9) processor. As we previewed back in March 2018, the Power9’ chip will feature a substantially upgraded memory subsystem that has a new, faster SERDES signaling technology, normally used for various kinds of system and accelerator interconnect, that has been tweaked to support memory buffers and therefore DDR4 and future memories.

  There is no technical …

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• IBM i Startup Tackles “Awkward” Git Integration

  September 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you have ever felt that working with Git on the IBM i platform was a little awkward and could be refined to fit your native IBM i development experience on RDi or SEU just a bit better, then you might be interested in learning about a new utility called iForGit that was recently released by IBM midrange veteran Richard Schoen and his new startup, MobiGoGo.

  Git came to the IBM i three years ago, and there’s no denying that it has been a hit. Since Linux developer Linus Torvalds released it nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, the open source …

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• Guru: MERGE, Chicken, And Eggs

  September 30, 2019 Ted Holt

  Which came first: the chicken or the egg? I don’t have time to ponder such trivialities. However, I am glad to know that SQL has a way to help me with chicken-and-egg database updates, i.e., when two statements need to run but each politely needs for the other to go first.

  Suppose you support an IBM i system that keeps up with inventory. It has an item master table (physical file) that stores general information such as a description, the standard cost, and the list price of an item.

  create table ItemMaster
    (ItemNumber     char(6),
     Revision       dec(3),
     Description    char(20),
     Cost           dec(5,2),
     

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• As I See It: De-Meritocracy

  September 30, 2019 Victor Rozek

  I don’t recall high school being a particularly joyous experience, but it wasn’t debilitating either. It was mostly leaden, with an occasional splash of color, spiced with alternating doses of bravado, awkwardness, and frustration. It wasn’t optimal, but it seems remarkably benign compared to today’s reality. A recent study of kids in an affluent Silicon Valley high school “found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.”

  Beyond the very real anxiety-inducing possibility of getting shot in the classroom, Daniel Markovits has another explanation for the …

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• Hyperconverged Takes The Mantle Of Integrated Systems

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes IBM sets the trends in the midrange, and sometimes it bucks them. The AS/400 was, in many respects, an integrated system and a hyperconverged system long before those words were ever used, but the way its storage and networking is architected, you could argue that the platform that it has fallen outside of these definitions. But as many expected, integrated systems in many different flavors have found favor in the datacenters of the world, and predominately at what in the past would have been midrange shops running proprietary minicomputers.

  According to the latest research by IDC, sales of converged …

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