• How IBM i Fared in Top ERP List

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Every year, Panorama Consulting comes out with a list of the top ERP systems and vendors. The list for 2016 has the usual suspects in it, as well as a decent representation of ERP systems that run on the IBM i platform. While there’s no hard data on the matter, anecdotal evidence suggests that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the primary type of application that customers run on IBM i servers. Whether companies develop their own software or buy a shrink-wrapped product from a vendor, most companies that run the IBM i server bought it to run a core

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• DSI Tries Virtualized Backup and Recovery for Power Systems

  November 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  Dynamic Solutions International, a company known for its line of virtual tape library (VTL) systems designed specifically for IBM i shops, just released virtualized backup and recovery software pre-built to handle deduplication, replication and encryption. It’s called DSI Restore and it’s implemented onto a VMware environment. DSI says it new backup and recovery virtual appliance is aimed at companies that find traditional cloud-based solutions cost prohibitive. DSI considers the backup and recovery appliance on VMware as an opportunity for IBM i shops to save money compared to the cost of adding Linux/VIOS partitions to a separate Power Systems backup

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• Iowa MSP Teams with Vision for Hosted HA

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In the market for hosted high availability? There’s a new IBM i offering now available from Iowa managed service provider (MSP) LightEdge Solutions, which teamed up recently with Vision Solutions to put MIMIX and iTERA Availability on its private Power Cloud. LightEdge Solutions is a 20-year old IT services firm based in Des Moines that hosts and manages systems on behalf of its clients. The company currently has two data centers, including a 20,000 square-foot facility in Altoona, Iowa, and another located in the underground “SubTropolis” business complex in Kansas City, Missouri. The company is currently building two additional

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• Is the IBM i Skills Shortage Accelerating Platform Migrations?

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  There are a lot of headwinds working against the IBM i platform, including a high up-front cost, a legacy perception, and executives who automatically default to X64 technology with technology decisions. These are all external challenges that the IBM i community can’t do much about. But there’s one headwind that’s internal to the IBM i community: A growing lack of personnel with the requisite IBM i skills. One company that’s transitioning off the IBM i platform due, in part, to a lack of skills is PRGX. For decades, the Atlanta, Georgia, company used IBM‘s midrange server to automate many

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• The New Tech Canoe: Paddle Less, Go Farther

  November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

  The unevenness of enterprise IT due to rapidly changing technology invariably puts pressure on companies unwilling or unable to invest in transforming their established core IT infrastructure consisting of primarily systems of record to a higher octane blend with greater emphasis on systems of engagement. Strategic reactions to this shift are happening throughout the IBM midrange, where the IBM i community–end users and software vendors–has a major presence and a conservative perspective. At the recent VAI Conference 2016, navigating transformation was the key ingredient in discussions around building efficiencies, reducing costs, increasing market share and resulting in profitability gains.

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• The Hybrid Cloud Questions IBM i Shops Should Be Asking

  November 7, 2016 Lief Morin

  When companies speak with service providers about hybrid cloud technology, many of them want to know right off the bat how much money they can save. That’s the wrong question to ask. The first questions should be: What business challenges do we face? Can the cloud help to address these challenges? And to what extent should we be using the cloud? A transition to the cloud or a hybrid environment can provide companies with many benefits aside from cost savings, such as a broader set of services, a highly resilient architecture and the addition of a professional organization that manages

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• Imagine There’s No Spinning Disk (It’s Easy If You Try)

  November 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The odds of finding a hard disk drive in your next storage array grows slimmer by the day as the cost of solid state disks continues to drop. The price/performance curve for SSDs has improved so much relative to spinning disk, in fact, that decision makers in IBM‘s storage division see a day when data goes straight from flash to tape as it cools, or what they term “FLAPE.” “The 15K RPM drives are going away,” Gary Albert, business line executive for IBM Storage, tells IT Jungle. “There’s going to be one more generation [of 15K RPM drives],

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• RPG Open Source Horse Pulls IBM i Community Plow

  November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

  The RPG development community is shrinking. I don’t mean because old programmers are riding into the sunset. I’m talking about collaboration and its ability to guide development that benefits the community by addressing the chAllanges of next generation applications for IBM midrange shops. Not that a collaborative open source culture is thriving here. But it could and it should. There are efforts to get this under way. And that will figuratively shrink the community. Tim Rowe, IBM i business architect for application development and systems management, supports the idea. “Why not have an RPG open source community? We have a

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• Sundry Fall Power Systems Peripheral Enhancements

  November 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still chewing through the October 11 Power Systems announcements, and this week we drill down into a variety of peripheral enhancements related to the IBM i platform. We may not have gotten new Power8+ processors for entry machines, and would have been expected sometime this year, but IBM is doing a bunch of things to make the existing Power8 machines more appealing and less costly to tide itself and its customers over until the Power9 processors ship sometime in the second half of next year. The midrange and high-end of the Power8 product line have already seen their

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• Beyond Hello With Node.js

  November 1, 2016 Aaron Bartell

  In Why Node.js? we discussed Node.js and how to get up to speed with “hello world” from a program, the Node.js REPL (Read, Eval, Print, and Loop), and a web application. Now we will build on that knowledge by actually creating an application to show your team. A gent by the name of Rainer Ross recently posted a link to the IBM i Professionals LinkedIn group declaring the benefits of the new Webix framework. (Webix.com is freemium software. There are free versions and paid versions. Please adhere to the licensing.) Because of my comments on his post I received an

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