• Shield Takes Another Stab At Multi Node In HA4i

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is putting the finishing touches on a new version of its HA4i high availability software that can replicate data across multiple nodes. The product, which has the working name HA4i Multi-Node, will allow customers to adopt more complex data replication flows, such as one-to-many and many-to-one, which puts it on a more solid footing with other HA products.

  IBM i shops have been steadily adopting high availability software over the past few years, studies such as HelpSystems‘ annual IBM i Marketplace Survey and Vision Solutions‘ State of Resilience show. We’re now at a point where …

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• ERP Caught Up In Cloud Updrafts

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but ERP software is headed up – into the clouds, that is. That’s according to the latest ERP survey from Panorama Consulting, which says more than four times as many users reported adopting cloud-based or SaaS ERP than deploying on-premise enterprise software.

  A quick look at Panorama Consulting‘s 2018 ERP Survey shows that cloud/software as a service (SaaS) and on-premise deployments of ERP effectively switched from 2017 to 2018. In 2017, the survey found that 67 percent of users reported deploying ERP on premise, while 33 percent reported using SaaS or cloud ERP.

  In 2018, Panorama …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 4

  April 4, 2018 Dan Burger

  It’s the 30^th anniversary of the IBM midrange platform and the celebration has begun. For now, the focus is on a new website and its growing repository of IBM i customer stories emphasizing innovative implementations from around the world. Monitor has found Steve Will’s blog on this topic and elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, we have our own story about the 30 years of innovation.

  Also inside Monitor are links to articles pertaining to the ruinous effects of poor data quality on machine learning, why email is the best social media for business, and fixes …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 13

  April 4, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  There is not much to write about this week, with lots of people on various holidays and breaks around the world. There is a new MQ Series group (SF99859), plus new HIPER, Security, BRMS, and Hardware groups this week. After the last couple months of announcements and the Spectre/Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities, IBM is catching up on fixes. Good stuff!

  As for the Spectre/Meltdown update, there is nothing new to report, I just didn’t want to write it out too quick – things like this come back to haunt you if you are not careful. . . .

  I …

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• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

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• Unintended Consequences: When Software Installations Go Off The Track

  April 2, 2018 Dan Burger

  It’s not like we never hear about the positive benefits of software upgrades or new software installations. There is no shortage of case studies that tell those stories. But the unintended consequences that gut punch implementations get a fair share of attention wherever IT professionals gather. These are usually complex and expensive projects where anything that goes wrong is magnified, but wounded projects know no boundaries. Workflow barriers, surprising conflicts, and disappearing functionality curse projects of all descriptions.

  Do you have an implementation specialist on staff or a trusted consultant to lead you to software implementation victory, or do you …

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• Guru: LTRIM + RTRIM > TRIM

  April 2, 2018 Ted Holt

  When IBM enhances SQL for my favorite database management system, I feel so happy I could dance like Karlos Klaumannsmoller selling diabetes medicine. It is my pleasure today to let you know (in case you don’t already know) that IBM has once again enhanced two SQL functions to make them as powerful as their RPG counterparts.

  The functions to which I refer are LTRIM (left trim) and RTRIM (right trim). Until recently these functions could only remove blanks (or hexadecimal zeros, for some data types) from the beginning (left) or end (right) of a string. IBM recently added …

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• Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support

  April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.

  In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …

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• Pay Attention To JDK And WebSphere Release Support

  April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops don’t have to use Big Blue’s WebSphere Application Server middleware to create Java, since some of the Java functions are built into the Apache Web server built into the operating system and open source programs like the Tomcat server, while not still supported, are nonetheless sometimes still used. Still other shops don’t go for the full-on WebSphere Application Server, but use the Express Edition that is bundled on the machine to provide a certain level of automation for Java workloads.

  IBM has been warning customers that they have to keep current on Java Development Kit (JDK) releases, …

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• SEA Launches New Job Scheduler For IBM i

  March 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it’s not talking System z mainframe tools, Software Engineering of America (SEA) has traditionally involved itself with IBM i security and messaging tools. But the New York software firm has expanded its repertoire to IBM i job scheduling with the recent launch of absScheduler.

  The new software was developed by SEA to be a “next-generation” job scheduler that can handle batch workloads across one or more IBM i partitions or systems. The software, which was developed by the same IBM i development team that developed the absMessage product over a decade ago, features both a 5250 green-screen interface and …

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