• What HelpSystems Is Up To Now

  June 13, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to a slew of acquisitions, HelpSystems has become one the largest independent software vendors in the IBM i marketplace, with tools spanning operations, security, backup, high availability, forms management, and capacity planning. A company representative recent sat down with IT Jungle at the recent COMMON PowerUp conference to talk about what’s new.

  HelpSystems didn’t have a single major product launch at the COMMON conference in San Antonio, Texas, two weeks ago. Instead the company used the event to showcase multiple enhancements, and to talk about future products — such as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution and …

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• What Cloud Providers Must Do To Attract IBM i

  June 13, 2018 Lief Morin

  The cloud is a compelling platform for almost every business. It’s real, and it’s here to stay. There are many reasons cloud consumption models are attractive, starting with the big four: predictable payments and cost savings, consistency of service, almost unlimited elasticity and access to advanced services and personnel. These are the benefits that cloud service providers have emphasized most as clients try to understand how cloud services might work best in their enterprise.

  The real benefits of the cloud, however, go far beyond these three things. As the cloud matures and service providers’ offerings blur into each other, they …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 13

  June 13, 2018 Dan Burger

  Our summer publishing schedule has prevented us from catching you up on what’s been going on around the IBM i ecosystem of late, but we always have our eye on the community for you. As you will note in our Top Stories below, Big Blue has been especially busy in many different tech arenas and around the globe.

  Top Stories From Outside The Jungle

  (The Motley Fool) CEO Ginni Rometty declares IBM’s new AI Supercomputer one of Big Blue’s greatest achievements as Summit makes its debut.

  (ZDNet) The clouds are rolling in as IBM creates 18 new “availability zones” in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 23

  June 13, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Here we are, back in the Wednesday issue of The Four Hundred where we belong, with the latest updates to the comings and goings of PTF patches for the IBM i platform.

  There is a new flight recorder for troubleshooting optical problems – OPT devices, including RDX attached – for IBM i 7.2 and 7.1. Check this link out if you are running any of these. It is a handy thing to know about.

  When ordering Cumulative PTF group(s), the DB and HIPER PTFs are included if the order is for your current release. If it is for a release …

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• IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

  June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …

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• Profound Logic Shows Off Innovation At PowerUp

  June 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The recent COMMON PowerUp 18 conference was a tour de force for Profound Logic, which not only showcased major enhancements to its flagship Web and mobile development tool for IBM i, Profound UI, but also swept the IBM Innovation Awards with two customer success stories.

  Let’s start with the Innovation Awards. Every year, IBM and COMMON highlight the innovative work that two companies do with their IBM i systems, including first and second place. While IBM i modernization vendors are usually well-represented in the nominations and eventual winners, we’ve never seen clients of the same modernization vendor take both first …

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• Guru: DB2 For i XML Composition And The IFS

  June 11, 2018 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike! Regarding Composing An XML Document From Relational Data, Part 1, I have built an XML document using DB2 and i. When I run the query, I get a worthless result set. How do I use the SQL XML functions to get a usable XML file?

  This question comes from reader RA, and he doesn’t exaggerate. The result set from his XML-based query looks like this:

  ....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+
  ************Beginning of data************** 
  
  XMLDATA 
  -------- 
  #CGULIB#
  
    1 RECORD(S) SELECTED.
  
   ************End of Data********************
  

  Notice that DB2 for i does nothing to make the XML attractive to human eyes as the entire XML …

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• As I See It: The Hunt For Perfect Storage

  June 11, 2018 Victor Rozek

  I have a garage so full of stuff my car winters outdoors. For all I know, D.B. Cooper stashed his loot in there, which is why it has never been found. After a fruitless hour searching for a power washer attachment, I would have been happy to set the whole mess ablaze.

  If the first half of my life was about acquiring stuff, the second half is about trying to get rid of it. Without much success. Abundance, of course, is not the worst difficulty ever to befall humankind, but like too much of any good thing, indulging yourself is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 22

  June 11, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are jumping around a bit this summer, so bear with us. We are running in both the Monday and the Wednesday editions of The Four Hundred this week to get caught up after a hiatus last week of the Wednesday issue. The news tends to be light in the summer, as you all know, so we often consolidate to one publication a week. This is particularly true after COMMON. Er, PowerUp 18.

  So here is what is going on. The Spectre/Meltdown (SM) PTFs have been rolled into the latest Security Group level for IBM i 7.3, 7.2, and …

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• Google Close to Launching IBM i Cloud Service, Will Says

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  One of the laments of Power chip types everywhere is the lack of a public cloud service for Power applications. While Linux and Windows folks can run their X86 workloads on multiple public clouds, the opportunities for hosting IBM i, AIX, or Power Linux workloads are limited to so-called private clouds. But according to IBM i chief architect Steve Will, that could soon be changing.

  While neither IBM nor Google have made any official announcements about Google running IBM i in its public cloud, Will talked openly about the relationship between the two tech giants at COMMON‘s PowerUp conference …

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