• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 25

  June 28, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to your own personal IBM i Patch Wednesday and the IBM i PTF Guide that helps you figure out what patches to apply to your releases so you can keep current and therefore keep optimal in terms of performance, stability, and security.

  In this week’s rendition, we see that the High Availability Group has some new fixes for us. I am a week or two late in reporting them for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.2, but they are here and available for us. The newest fixes allow for additional logging for better error determination in special resynch …

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• DB2 For i Support Now Offered by Rimini Street

  June 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops now have another option for obtaining technical support and maintenance services in support their DB2 for i environment: Rimini Street. And in some cases, owing to the uniquely integrated nature of this platform, the vendor will even provide support for the IBM i operating system as well.

  Earlier this month, the Las Vegas, Nevada, company announced that it’s now offering third-party support services for all three versions of IBM‘s DB2 database – DB2 for i, DB2 for z/OS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (a.k.a. “Cousin LUWy”), in addition to the SQL Server database from …

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• Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …

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• Guru: Storing Images In An SQL Table, Part 1

  June 26, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, we’ll look at how we can store images (or other media) in an SQL table on the IBM i. To accomplish this goal, we’ll write an RPG program that reads a table that has the name and location of the images from a folder in the IFS, and writes those images to a table.

  The images will be stored in a column that is defined as a BLOB data type. ‘BLOB’ stands for ‘Binary Large Object’, and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database. …

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• IT Budgets Partly Sunny Thanks To The Cloud

  June 26, 2017 Dan Burger

  Lowering costs is not the only thing to scrutinize when noodling the idea of moving selected IT workloads to the cloud. But people do tend to focus on that and wonder if the cloud saves money or if the costs just get moved around like the pea under the shell in the old carnival game.

  Computer Economics, in its latest report on IT spending, presents data that credits cloud for the continued success of do-more-with-less strategies in IT departments of all shapes and sizes. The report backs that up by unearthing a five-year pattern of IT spending reductions figured …

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• How Far We Have Come

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the AS/400 turned 29 last week – and yes, I know the stack is called IBM i and I know that it now runs on what IBM calls Cognitive Systems based on Power processors – I happened to be on an airplane coming back from Frankfurt, Germany, after attending the International Supercomputing Conference. As it turns out, the Power9 processor married to Nvidia’s Tesla coprocessors using its “Volta” GPUs was one of the hot topics of conversation, and so was the coherent, shared memory architecture that will lash CPUs and GPUs into a shared memory space of sorts that …

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• Seven Bright Spots To Ponder On The AS/400’s 29th Birthday

  June 21, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Today is the 29th birthday of the AS/400. If the box was a person, it would be pondering the big three-oh coming next year, and perhaps taking one last year to bask in the glory of youth. While the IBM i platform is no youngster, it’s far from the grave.

  Here are seven bright spots that could potentially illuminate the platform’s path forward into middle age:

  All About Those Apps, Apps, Apps

  IT decision makers typical don’t start using a particular computer platform because of the platform itself, but because of the applications. Applications drive server sales.

  The IBM i …

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• IBM i, Watson & Bluemix: The REST Of The Story

  June 21, 2017 Dan Burger

  Integrated Web Services is nothing new for IBM i. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new in Web services. A couple of years ago, IBM introduced Bluemix, an integration framework that, among other things, allows applications on other systems to connect with business logic running on i. The Bluemix tooling was designed to consume REST APIs, which can be used to connect Watson and IBM i. That’s where the newness is evident.

  The plumbing that’s necessary to make these things happen is being built by the IBM i development team led by Tim Rowe, business architect for IBM i …

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• Dell EMC Revs All-Flash Arrays

  June 21, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Dell EMC shipped new releases of its VMAX All-Flash array last month that supports IBM i and other platforms. Specifically, the computer giant rolled out a new entry-level array that stores up to 1 petabyte, as well as a 4 PB monster designed for the most demanding operational and analytic workloads.

  Dell EMC has a long history of providing enterprise-class storage for the IBM i server and its predecessors, starting with the old EMC Symmetrix arrays and continuing with today’s flagship VMAX All Flash frames. In fact, Dell EMC is the only other provider of native storage for IBM i …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 21

  June 21, 2017 Dan Burger

  If you’re on top of your game, you see this coming. But even the best prepared are sometimes surprised. When the time comes for a platform evaluation at your organization, can you defend what you do and why you are doing it? Before you get caught with your pants down, read this advice from someone who knows how to cover his technology assets.

  This week’s Monitor also includes articles on accurately accessing emerging technology while facing a hurricane of hyperbole, measuring your Digital IQ (the results won’t be made public), and what’s behind the Oracle to DB2 database migrations. We …

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