• Service Extension Outlined For IBM i 7.1 And PowerHA 7.1

  December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Operating system suppliers do not like to support too many releases of their code at the same time. It stands to reason because software support costs have people as a foundation, and people only get more expensive, not less so. And the companies that make operating systems have newer code with more features and better security and reliability that they want their customers to move to.

  IBM i 7.1 has been a well-regarded instance of Big Blue’s proprietary midrange operating systems, a line that arguably stretches all the way back to the first release of Control Program Facility (CPF) for …

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• Is The ‘Golden Age’ of Computing Leaving IBM i Behind?

  December 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  About 50,000 people descended upon Las Vegas last week for AWS re:Invent, the biggest cloud computing conference in the industry. And AWS didn’t disappoint, rolling out dozens of new services, including automated machine learning, a multi-master NoSQL database, and even a graph database for finding hidden connections among billions of data points. With all the innovation going on at AWS, it’s worth wondering whether cloud innovation is leaving IBM i customers behind.

  AWS CEO Andy Jassy didn’t mince words in describing what he views as the current computing revolution. “We are going through the biggest transformation of technology in our …

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• Guru: A Handy Function for Unit Testing

  December 4, 2017 Paul Tuohy

  I would like to share a technique I use for dealing with lists in an RPG unit test program. According to Wikipedia, “. . . unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code, sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures, are tested to determine whether they are fit for use.”

  In the world of modern RPG, this translates to writing “test” programs to test a specific piece of code. For example, when I write a subprocedure, I will write a test program that …

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• Fresche Plan: Guidance Leads To Growth

  December 4, 2017 Dan Burger

  Without wings, an airplane has no chance to fly. A legacy-based IBM i shop is like an airplane without wings. During the past few years, more companies have recognized that IT modernization is necessary. It’s a complex problem with many moving parts and deserves a strategic approach for best results. At the same time, the transition has become an easier problem to solve.

  Tools have evolved and much of the manual labor that was once required has been automated. And service providers have stepped up to handle work that companies are ill-equipped to take on themselves. Companies that are quick …

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• The Tipping Point For Power9

  December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market is booming as 2017 comes to a close, and IBM is looking to try to catch the tailwind and lift its Power Systems business from the doldrums and get it rising again on the IBM i, AIX, and Linux fronts. The word on the street is that the first commercial Power9 machines, the ones aimed at HPC and AI workloads, will ship sometime before the end of the year, with a fairly quick ramp of Power9 systems for more generic workloads.

  It can’t come a moment too soon, and while we wish IBM had started shipping Power9 …

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• Food Company Goes All In With WebFocus BI

  November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of business intelligence software is a notoriously difficult thing to do. But when it comes to Lipari Foods and its implementation of Information Builders’ BI suite, it’s safe to say that its employees’ relationship to data has changed in a profound and meaningful way.

  Lipari Foods is a midsize company headquartered in Warren, Michigan, that distributes food to 5,000 customers in 18 Midwestern states, a range that extends from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Thanks to the surge in popularity of specialty foods, such as gluten-free and halal, the privately owned distributor has grown quickly, and …

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• Mainframe And IBM i Share App Dev Testing Tool

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The integration of disparate IT systems is on the priority list for many companies aggravated by the duplication of effort and the cost tooling for each development environment. It’s fueled the rise of DevOps and the big picture view emphasizing speed and collaboration. For IT environments that share mainframe and IBM i platforms, we have uncovered software that allows applications written in COBOL, PL/I, EGL, RPG and Assembler to share a single tool for testing programs.

  The tool is called XaTester and it’s available through IBM and the company, Xact Consulting, that created it. Xact Consulting is an international …

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• Fiserv Banks On FlashSystem For Speedup

  November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There are lots of ways to make your transaction and analytic workloads move a little faster: optimize the database, add memory, tweak some code. But if you want to make them go a lot faster, pair them with a bank of high-speed solid state drives. That’s what IBM i banking software provider Fiserv did recently with IBM’s FlashSystem storage gear.

  According to an IBM Solution Brief, the Brookfield, Wisconsin, software vendor went to IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, lab in late 2015 to benchmark a FlashSystem storage array for a large commercial bank that’s a user of Signature, Fiserv‘s IBM …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 29

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The modernization of RPG applications begins with modern RPG development skills. There are several ways to upgrade RPG skills or introduce developers to RPG for the first time. One of them is to connect with Jim Buck. He has 15 years of teaching RPG at the collegiate level, co-authored an RPG textbook, and anchored the team that established the RPG certification test.

  This week in Monitor, we have the transcript of Paul Tuohy’s interview with Buck, along with articles on the rise container-style application development, dealing with digital transformation disruption, and both sides of the looming FCC decision on net …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Numbers 45 And 46

  November 28, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There has not been much happening in the past several weeks in IBM i PTF Land, but here is a roundup of the little bit that that did happen.

  In the IBM i PTF Guide Number 45, we have new groups for the HTTP Server and Open Source. If you haven’t checked out the open source licensed programs yet, you can find it at this link.

  In Number 46 of the IBM i PTF Guide, there were Recommended Fixes for V7R3, V7R2, and V7R1. There were also patches for the Cryptographic Services/DCM and Cryptographic Co-processor for Power Systems, …

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