• We’re All IBM i Storytellers

  August 29, 2016 Dan Burger

  Everyone has a story. Alison Butterill has quite a few. They’re all about i. She didn’t make them up. You did. Or, at least, some of you did. These are stories only you can tell. Butterill, the widely traveled IBM i product offering manager, just repeats them. Storytelling was part of her session titled IBM i in the Digital World, which I sat in on at the OCEAN Technical Conference last month in Orange County, California. The reason you are the only ones who can tell them is because they’re about you and your IBM i. Butterill collects them

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• Power9 Gets Ready To Roll In Systems In 2017

  August 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In about a year or so, a radically different Power processor family will be embedded as the motors in the Power Systems machines that will drive IBM i applications into the future. The forthcoming Power9 chips, which IBM’s top techies unveiled at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley last week, are as always packed with lots of technical innovation. But that is not the main thing that IBM i shops should be ebullient about. The real innovation that will drive the Power platform forward is the OpenPower Foundation and the fact that Big Blue has rearchitected its chips and

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• Knocking On The Old Database Door

  August 22, 2016 Dan Burger

  Keeping up with technology should be systematic and efficient. Avoidance behavior will only reduce your anxiety for so long. At some point, the limitations companies have learned to live with and consider “good enough” will prevent them from keeping up with the herd. Here are three organizations that realized it was time to take on database modernization, after discovering their existing databases lacked documentation, defined relationships and normalized procedures. The three examples are projects that involve Resolution Software, a company that specializes in database modernization services and developed software that automates much of the labor intensive work in the

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• As I See It: Breakup

  August 22, 2016 Victor Rozek

  I went to a wedding last weekend and it was everything a wedding should be: beautifully located, attended by scores of family, supported by legions of friends, and replete with that singular optimistic naivety that believes in happily ever after. While it would be foolish to marry without a firm belief in the prospect of future happiness, regrettably “happily ever after” has a shelf life for about half of all married couples. There’s a fair chance that at some point during the career of a married employee, divorce will bring an unexpected end to what might have been. Whether amicable

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• Vision Bolsters Entry-Level HA With iTERA 6.2

  August 22, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Small and midsize IBM i shops that are looking to adopt a high availability (HA) solution to protect their businesses from downtime have a lot of options available to them these days, including cloud solutions and hardware-based offerings from IBM. SMBs looking for in-house logical replication solutions will eventually call on Vision Solutions, which recently added some enterprise-level features to its entry-level solution with the launch of iTERA Availability version 6.2. It’s a great time to adopt HA for IBM i shops. The combination of dropping hardware and software costs, higher levels of affordable network bandwidth, and the

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• IBM i Power8 Migrations Flourish, Say Service Providers

  August 22, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s second quarter financial report was an icy description of Power Systems revenue. It exposed a shivering 24 percent decline compared to a year earlier. Despite that biting insight, there’s a warm glow in the midrange market that is predicted to continue through the third quarter. Migrations to Power8 boxes are finding momentum in the IBM i-dominated small to midsize market, where purchases have been delayed, but are now occurring at an accelerated pace. With hardware migrations comes downtime, so it’s interesting to take a peek at how the migration/downtime dilemma is being handled. Bob Johnson, an executive vice

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• The Prospects For A Power9 Revolution

  August 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a relative underdog as a supplier of processors in the datacenter now that it has left the X86 server market and has gone from being a partner of Intel to a direct competitor that is fostering its own ecosystem in the richest and most competitive parts of the market, IBM wants for the Power processor to be able to take on the Xeon chip and win. The Power9 chip from Big Blue has about the best chance of any chip we have seen from IBM since the Power4 way back in 2001 to do this. The top chip engineers

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• Cilasoft Offers No Cost Job Log Exploration Tool

  August 17, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i equivalent of a mountain avalanche is the job queue file. It’s a mass of files with the potential to eventually bury system admins as they search for good jobs that have gone bad. When job logs are thousands of pages in length and contain many similar entries, the search for specific troublesome job logs can become tedious, aggravating, and time consuming. About this time, users start wishing for a tool that efficiently sorts job log information. You might happily pay for a tool that reduces the amount of time it takes to track down jobs that are

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• TEMBO Adds Development Tool to Database Modernization Kit

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  TEMBO Technology Lab is beefing up its DB2 for i modernization solution. The South African provider of DB2 for i database modernization solutions has reached an agreement with Relational Data to resell its rapid application development tool for IBM i as part of its core Adsero Optima (AO) suite. Based in West Jordan, Utah, Relational Data is a longtime provider of IBM i-based applications and tools to the education market. Its OnePoint suite of software automates a range of processes for schools, including recording grades, managing student and parent data, and streamlining back-office functions like operations, HR, and finance. The

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• Bank Says ‘HA’ to System i Hardware Failure

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When the New Zealand bank Westpac experienced a rare backplane failure in its System i server last year, it took a critical wholesale trading application completely offline. IBM immediately put a replacement on a plane, but the best case scenario called for three days of downtime. But thanks to its use of a high availability solution from Maxava, not a single transaction was lost. With more than 13 million customers, Westpac is one of the biggest banks in the Asia Pacific region, and one of Australia’s “big four” banks. The Sydney-based company relies on a variety of applications and

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