• IBM i Survey Gets Better As Numbers Grow

  October 11, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i Strategy and Roadmap document lays out the plan for the future. That’s great. We need to see where we’re going. But the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey indicates whether IBM i shops are following the roadmap or charting their own courses. Now in its third year, the survey is our best view of the ecosystem. October is survey month and we encourage IT Jungle readers to get involved in this IBM i assessment. The 2016 Marketplace Survey was based on the responses of 834 IBM i shops. That was more than three times the number that weighed

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• HelpSystems Adds High Availability After Bug Busters Buy

  October 11, 2016 Alex Woodie

  You can add one more item to the long list of products that HelpSystems offers: high availability software. Following its recent acquisition of Bug Busters Software Engineering, HelpSystems last week unveiled its new Robot HA product, which will be targeted largely at small and medium IBM i shops that haven’t had HA before. Robot HA is the new name for RSF-HA, the IBM i data mirroring product that Bug Busters launched more than 10 years ago at the bargain-basement price of $1,300. Over the years, Bug Busters president and sole developer Bruce Lesnick expanded upon the core functionality shipped

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• IBM Rejiggers PowerHA CBU And HyperSwap

  October 11, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM today unveiled several enhancements to PowerHA for i as part of its semi-annual Technology Refresh for the IBM i stack. First up is a new Capacity BackUp (CBU) system that will be more affordable and easier to use. The company also announced that it will officially be supporting PowerHA’s HyperSwap functionality on SAN Volume Controller (SVC) appliances, not just the DS800. Cloud-based IBM i storage and Unix-only resiliency features round out what’s new in PowerHA. IBM is rolling out a rehashed CBU for Power Systems offering that will be better than last year’s CBU program. IBMers say last year’s

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• The Deal The Power 850C Implies For IBM i Shops

  October 11, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we have been hearing on the grapevine, IBM is indeed going to put out a cloudy, revved up version of its four-socket Power Systems machine, the Power E850C. This system actually features a faster–and hotter–Power8 processor, which gives the machine a little more oomph so it can better compete against systems based on Intel’s Xeon E5-4600 and Xeon E7-4800 motors. This machine also represent the entry level of the C-style cloudy systems that IBM has cooked up, which sport OpenStack cloud controllers and PowerVM hypervisors for building private clouds. But like the Power E850 predecessor that Big Blue

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• IBM i Tech Refresh Arrives; JSON And Perl In Spotlight

  October 11, 2016 Dan Burger

  After the release of IBM i 7.3 this past spring, we’ve traveled six months down the road and it’s already time for a Technology Refresh. That’s TR 1 for the fresh-faced 7.3 and TR 5 for i 7.2, which was hatched in May 2014. For the record, let’s also note that i 7.1 debuted in April 2010 and the Technology Refresh program is now six years old. Here’s the latest stuff from the TR pipeline. As always, there are added features to appreciate in this latest TR. After all, the software is guided by requests from the IBM i advisory

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• Searching Source In The Twenty-First Century

  October 4, 2016 Ted Holt

  I love it when IBM gives me a way for me to do something I couldn’t do before. When I think of the tools I had to work with three decades ago, I could almost weep. Recently I had to search a source member for a string of characters, and I was overjoyed that LPEX gave me what SEU couldn’t. To set the stage for my requirement, I should mention that as a matter of practice, I qualify data structures in my RPG programs. For me to omit the qualified keyword, I have to have a reason. dcl-ds Status qualified;

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• What’s In A Save File?

  October 4, 2016 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Juliet wondered, “What’s in a name?” Ted wondered, “What’s in a save file?” The Display Save File (DSPSAVF) command would show me only so much, so I wrote a utility to give me more information. Maybe it will be helpful to you. It’s common for me to exchange save files with other IBM i professionals. One problem I often run into is that someone (who might be me) cannot restore a save file to their system because the save file was created for a more recent release of

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• A Style Guide For Modern RPG And ILE, Part 1

  October 4, 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 and an article to follow are a style guide to coding RPG programs using free-form RPG in an ILE environment. When developing guidelines and standards, one of the major challenges is to determine what is a standard and what is a guideline. For example, code indentation would be a standard, but whether the code is indented by two,

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• Two Fall Conferences Are Must-See IT

  October 3, 2016 Dan Burger

  In just a few weeks, the COMMON user group has two conferences offering IBM i education. It’s good to know there are still companies and individuals that value the development of IT expertise, innovation, and industry best practices. The evolution of IBM i skills has never been more important than it is today, but overall the attendance at technical conferences has remained at about the same level for the past five years. COMMON has its Fall Conference scheduled for October 24-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and BeNeLux Power 2016–hosted by COMMON organizations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is set for

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• Big Blue Patches 14 More OpenSSL Flaws In IBM i

  October 3, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the OpenSSL encryption protocol will want to know that IBM last week issued program temporary fixes (PTFs) for 14 security vulnerabilities impacting IBM i versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. If you’re running an older version of the IBM i OS, you are out of luck. Like most modern operating systems, IBM i includes a range of open source components. That includes OpenSSL, which is an open source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) wire encryption protocols that’s managed by the OpenSSL Project. As we learned following the big

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