• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 9

  March 8, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  For the past 19 years now, IBM midrange business partner DLB Systems Associates has been putting together a guide to help OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops figure out what to patch in their operating systems for midrange gear every week. This IBM i PTF Guide is incorporated it into the Wednesday edition of The Four Hundred starting in 2017.

  From here on out, to make things predictable, the IBM i PTF Guide will be located in story five of that Wednesday edition of the newsletter, right below Four Hundred Monitor, which we have also preserved and brought inside …

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• IBM i License Transfer Deal Comes To The Power S812 Mini

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early days of the AS/400 midrange system, the processor, memory, networking, and disk and tape storage hardware embodied in the system was by far the most costly part of that system, far outweighing the cost of the systems software that ran atop it. We don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but it was something like 85 percent hardware cost and 15 percent software cost.

  Fast-forward a few decades, and the Moore’s Law improvements in every component in the hardware means that hardware is far less costly. But software doesn’t have a Moore’s Law scaling; in fact, …

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• The Missing RPG OA Puzzle Piece

  March 6, 2017 Dan Burger

  RPG Open Access is a technology that was introduced with much fanfare with the IBM i 7.1 release of the operating system. That was in 2010. A handful of software vendors showed what it could do by using it in their application modernization tool kits as a means to get beyond screen-scraping and actually control the user interface.

  Now RPG OA is seven years old and not a lot has changed. A few more vendors have incorporated it as a method for creating user interfaces. The potential for RPG OA is mostly unrealized and it remains unrecognized by the majority …

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• Guru: The PHP Path To Victory, Part 1

  March 6, 2017 Chris Ringer

  If you read my two previous PHP articles, you may be tempted to make the leap to use PHP on your IBM i. But you may also have reservations because how in the world will you technically support those apps post implementation?

  This article discusses the path a PHP request takes as it travels through various subsystems up to your RPG code and how to do basic troubleshooting if something goes wrong.

  Tag Team Match

  Often greatness is achieved with the help of someone else. Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. Babe Ruth had Lou Gehrig. And Abbott had Costello. In …

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• IBM i Cloud Providers React To Amazon S3 Outage

  March 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Last week’s Amazon S3 outage served as a wakeup call that cloud platforms, despite the scalability and availability advantages, actually aren’t infallible. But will the Internet giant’s East Coast outage have any lasting effect on cloud adoption? And will it impact cloud adoption among IBM i customers? We asked some experts to find out.

  User error was blamed on the “impairment” of US East 1, one of 16 “regions” under the massive AWS tent. The region, which is based in AWS’ Ashburn, Virginia data center, never went down entirely, despite claims that all of AWS was down, or that the …

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• Servers Hit The Skids Last Year, This Year Might be No Better

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the first building block of any system is the server, and watching how these are acquired, managed, and disposed of tells you a lot about what is going on with applications in the datacenter and who is making money off of them. It has been a long time since the Power Systems division at IBM has been an economic powerhouse in the server space, but now even the X86 platform, long dominated by Intel, is starting to show some signs of losing its luster.

  It stands to reason. In the final quarter of this year, X86-based machines accounted for …

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• A Youth Movement For IBM i Champions

  March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but there’s a veritable youth movement afoot in IBM i land. While the platform may not be turning heads on college campuses just yet, it received a vigorous shot in the arm when IBM named relative youngsters Liam Allan and Kody Robinson to the latest crop of Champions for Power.

  The IBM i platform may appear to outsiders as a stodgy old platform maintained by graying men and women on the brink of retirement. But for those on the inside and in the know, there’s an understanding that sophisticated software never gets old and never goes out …

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• Bank-Turned MSP Sees Growth in IBM i

  March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There aren’t a lot of areas of the IBM i business that are growing these days. Fewer companies are running the platform, which causes young people to look elsewhere to start their careers. That dynamic is actually helping to drive business for First National Technology Solutions, which was an IBM i customer before becoming a managed service provider (MSP).

  In January, First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) announced it was seeing “a sharp increase” in demand for IBM i and mainframe hosting. While the Omaha, Nebraska-based company gets most of its revenue by providing private and hybrid cloud hosting for Windows …

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• VAI And HelpSystems Integrate ERP And Document Management

  March 1, 2017 Dan Burger

  The paper chase continues. File cabinets stuffed like sausages. Purchase orders, invoices, adjustments, and correspondence in an archive and retrieval system that’s been used since the horse and buggy days. Electronic document management has yet to arrive at a surprising number of midsize businesses.

  Data management begins here at the intersection of modern ERP and digital business processing. “Companies in every industry are looking for ways to streamline business processes,” says Joe Scioscia, vice president of sales at VAI, an ERP software company that has added a document management component via a partnership with HelpSystems. Workflow efficiencies are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 1

  March 1, 2017 Dan Burger

  If you put the IBM i community under a microscope, you might see a few little squiggly things that generally unseen by the naked eye. Those things would be database engineers. Seldom seen doesn’t mean they are of little consequence. DB2 for i is the heart of the system. If you run the system, you should make sure it’s heart healthy.

  Back for its fourth consecutive year, the Women in IT conference is a professional development eye-opener for all IT pros. A look back at last year’s conference might inspire you to attend the upcoming repeat event. For additional events …

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