• IBM Opens Up Coherent Protocols For Power Chips

  October 24, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you did not get the memo, IBM is dead serious about promoting the Power architecture as a credible alternative to the Xeon architecture from Intel and the various upstarts that want to take a piece of the processing action in the datacenter. The OpenPower Foundation, formed a little more than three years ago, is the center of gravity for the Power push, but Big Blue has aspirations for some of its technology that go well beyond its own chips. That is why IBM is forming the OpenCAPI Consortium, a group of like-minded IT suppliers and customers who

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• Don’t Overlook These Network Auditing Improvements in IBM i 7.3

  October 24, 2016 Alex Woodie

  What is going across those network cables connecting your IBM i server to the outside world? It’s not always easy to tell, and IBM hasn’t exactly made it easy. But thanks to new security event types and exit points released earlier this year in IBM i 7.3, you can get deeper visibility into network traffic and make your company’s SIEM system work better with your IBM i along the way. The focus over the past few weeks has been on IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.2 TR5. There is a lot of good stuff in there,

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• Zend Preps Speedy New PHP and Runtime for IBM i

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Zend today will officially launch the beta program for Zend Server for IBM i version 9 and the new PHP 7 language running on the Power Systems platform. The combination of the new language and runtime, which are being unveiled at the annual ZendCon 2016 show in Las Vegas this week, is expected to give customers a big boost in performance for their PHP applications, provided they don’t run into backward compatibility breaks that Zend built into the framework. Performance is the definite headliner for the new PHP 7 language and Zend Server runtime. As we told you back in

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• Agilysys Delivers Upgrades to Back Office and Customer-Facing Software

  October 19, 2016 Dan Burger

  The notion that what goes on in the IT departments of companies in the gaming industry translates into IT departments of every other business is not a long-shot bet. The gaming business–casinos and their tentacles that reach into restaurants and lodging–is as customer-focused as any business you can name. And, as many of you know, it’s a bastion of IBM midrange computing–an important niche in the IBM i ecosystem. Developments here often fan out to other industries when business efficiencies and increased revenue generation opportunities have been demonstrated. Agilysys, with its property management, inventory and procurement software Stratton Warren

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• Customers React Positively to IBM i Alerting Tool from Kisco

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Kisco Information Systems launched its $400 alerting tool in 2015, there were questions whether a relatively simple product would resonate with IBM i shops. A year later, Kisco is delivering a second version of iEventMonitor, and customers are singing its praise. Kisco launched iEventMonitor in March 2015 with a basic premise: provide monitoring and alerting of key IBM i resources like QSYSOPR and QSYSMSG queues, the job queue, message queues and storage and CPU monitoring. While other vendors developed tools that could automatically respond to events on an IBM i server, Kisco eschewed the extra functionality that would increase

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• One on One with HiT’s Giacomo Lorenzin

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Some people say data is the new oil. If that’s true, then what better business to be in than selling tools to the data miners? That’s basically what HiT Software does. IT Jungle recently caught up with Giacomo Lorenzin, the managing director for the BackOffice Associates subsidiary, to talk about what’s driving business, the latest in data integration tools, and the state of the industry. This is a condensed version of a Q and A that was conducted via email. IT Jungle: First of all, how’s business? How are sales of IBM i software going? Giacomo Lorenzin: The

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• On Your IBM i Radar Now: GDPR

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that have European customers, take note: In about 18 months, you will need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or face hefty fines. That’s not much time to come to grips with a data privacy law that’s been called “PCI on steroids” and an “IRS audit of your data,” but that’s the reality nonetheless. If you’re wondering what the heck this GDPR thing is, you’re not alone. A survey conducted by Dell last month indicates that fewer than 20 percent of company representatives were even aware of GDPR. But as the old saying goes,

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• SQL PL Conditional Structures

  October 18, 2016 Ted Holt

  Recently I gave a brief introduction to the SQL Procedures Language, or SQL PL, a procedural language that works with the DB2 family of database management systems. Today I present the conditional structures, IF and CASE. If you so choose, you will master them in minutes. But first, I need to clear up one matter. In my previous article, I referred to SQL PL as a proprietary language. Mike Cain, of the DB2 for i Center of Excellence, emailed to correct my error. Mike pointed out that SQL PL is based on SQL/Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM), which is an

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• Replacing Source in The Twenty-First Century

  October 18, 2016 Ted Holt

  In Searching Source in The Twenty-First Century, I introduced the use of regular expressions for searching within a source member. Searching is great, but sometimes you need to replace what the system finds with something else. Here’s how to replace text when using regular expressions. Let’s begin with a source member. Notice that there are nine constants named Stat10 through Stat90. Let’s replace Stat with Status_. Obviously we can’t replace Stat with Status everywhere it’s found. That would be disastrous! Instead, let’s use a regular expression to find the instances where Stat is followed by a digit. I

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• A Style Guide for Modern RPG and ILE, Part 2

  October 18, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  One of the basic principles of programming is that coding conventions (guidelines and standards) improve the readability of source code and make software maintenance easier. Coding conventions provide the foundation for developing applications that are easy to maintain and modify. This article completes the style guide to coding RPG programs using free-form RPG in an ILE environment started in A Style Guide For Modern RPG And ILE, Part 1. Older Functions When using free-form RPG (and nothing but free-form RPG), a lot of the old RPG “functionality” is no longer available (e.g., operation codes such as MOVE, MOVEL, GOTO,

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