• 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

  … Read more

• 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],

  … Read more

• 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

  … Read more

• 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

  … Read more

• 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

  … Read more

• SQL PL–The FOR Loop

  November 1, 2016 Ted Holt

  SQL PL has four looping structures. The most useful one, to my way of thinking, is the FOR structure. It is different from–and more powerful than–the RPG FOR op code, and it’s easy to learn and use. Here’s how it works. FOR iterates over a read-only result set and terminates when there are no more rows to process. Think of a FOR loop as a read-only cursor without the messiness of OPEN, FETCH, and CLOSE. Let me illustrate with a stored procedure. create or replace Procedure Billing (in p_BillingCycle dec(3)) for One_Customer as select c.AccountNumber from customers as c where

  … Read more

• IBM i Access Client Solutions For Database

  November 1, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  If you are an SQL user, you need to get your hands on IBM i Access Client Solutions. After some false starts, it looks as if IBM is heading in the right direction again when it comes to providing tools to help us develop and use SQL. I want to take you through some of the highlights of the database functions of IBM i Access Client Solutions. Some Background Over the last few years, trying to find the right tools for the SQL developer has been quite a challenge. There were Run SQL Scripts in System i Navigator, the

  … Read more

• Questions Arise Over IBM’s New Cloud Backup for IBM i

  October 31, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM raised some eyebrows with the recent release of its Cloud Storage Solutions for i, which enables IBM i shops to back up and archive DB2 and IFS data to its SoftLayer cloud. Much of the initial feedback to IBM’s first native cloud solution for IBM i was positive. But some IBM business partners are already questioning whether the solution will be actually useful for customers as it now stands. Cloud Storage Solutions for i was a part of IBM’s big October 11 announcement for IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 1 (TR1) and 7.2 TR5. The software, which carries product

  … Read more

• As I See It: Paying To Play

  October 31, 2016 Victor Rozek

  It was Fitzgerald who is credited with making what is surely one of the more self-evident observations in history. Namely that “the rich are different from you and me.” To which Hemmingway supposedly replied, “yeah, they have more money.” It didn’t actually happen that way, but small matter. The exchange–more literary than conversational–stuck in the popular imagination. Different though they may be, the rich have the same essential needs as their less affluent brethren. Like the rest of us they crave connection, but that craving is informed by a fear of being taken advantage of. That, in brief, is the

  … Read more

• The Time And Tech Are Right For Online Backups

  October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

  Logically, tape backups shouldn’t be as popular as they are. The process is cumbersome and hardly aligned with the accelerating pace of IT capabilities and business decision making. When you factor in the recovery time for most companies that rely on tape, the logic becomes twisted. Even with automation, shorter backup windows, multi-platform complexity, and regulatory compliance combine to push the question of whether tape is reasonable, in spite of its widespread popularity. The online, service-based, backup alternative has been in place for almost 30 years with many improvements during that time. Internet connectivity, CPU capacity, data compression, encryption, and

  … Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles