The IT Jungle

Mad Dog 21/21: The Mainframe Was The Message

May 2, 2016 Hesh Wiener

In 1964, as IBM announced the System/360, Marshall McLuhan, a professor at the University of Toronto, published a remarkable book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He said each medium, independent of its content, is a powerful social force with characteristics that reshape the way people are interconnected.

McLuhan distilled his thesis to a single memorable phrase: the medium is the message. Like print, radio, movies, and television, computing technologies, from the punch card to the mainframe to the mobile internet, are media, too. IBM doesn’t fully understand this; consequently, it flails and struggles.

Marshall McLuhan:

IBM Bolsters HyperSwap to Protect IBM i Against Downtime

May 2, 2016 Alex Woodie

A new release of the HyperSwap feature in IBM‘s PowerHA Enterprise Edition will give IBM i shops better protection against IBM i downtime–in particular during planned downtime events, like operating system upgrades. IBM also released a statement of direction to bring more disaster recovery (DR) capabilities to HyperSwap, including support for a remotely located third copy of IBM i data.

HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature introduced two years ago with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The mainframe-class technology relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous data replication protocol (i.e. Metro Mirror) to replicate DB2 for

Study Identifies Disturbing IBM i Security Weaknesses

May 2, 2016 Dan Burger

Security threats–data breaches with bruising economic consequences that are triggered from within organizations, not outside–are beginning to grab the attention businesses formerly passive about the risks of status quo unpreparedness. Could be just in the nick of time. “We’d be lying if we said breaches were only happening to a small percentage of IBM i systems,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies at HelpSystems and the author of 2016 State of IBM i Security Study.

This is the 13th year for the annual security report that identifies mistakes in system configurations that open the door to a smorgasbord

Making The Case For Flash Over Disk In Power Systems

May 2, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Two weeks ago, concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.3, Big Blue announced a slew of new flash storage drives and storage controllers, which we told you about based on the announcement letters as we normally do. Since that time, we have got our hands on some internal analysis that IBM has done for Power Systems partners and customers, and are sharing that with you to help in your buying decisions as you contemplate adding flash to your systems or, perhaps, even going all flash.

Enterprises are doing it, now that the price for effective capacity after data compression

IBM i Scalability Stays The Same With 7.3

April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

All operating systems are not created equal, at least not when it comes to NUMA scalability. For a long time now, the IBM i operating system has trailed the scalability of its peers, AIX and Linux, on Power processors when it comes to spanning the large number of cores and threads that IBM forges into its Power machinery.

Back in the dawn of time, and many of you were there with me, it was a very exciting thing to even be able to have a two-processor, two-thread machine like the AS/400-D80, which made its debut in April 1991 and which

Keep An i On Open Source

April 25, 2016 Dan Burger

The marriage of open source and IBM i reminds me of a marriage statistic that recently came to my attention: Approximately $6 billion in revenue is lost by American businesses as a result of decreased worker productivity linked to marriage hardship. Employees in a happy marriage, in contrast, tend to increase a company’s bottom line. From what I have seen of IBM i advocates in relationships with open source, happiness seems to abound.

Cross-trained RPG developers boasting open source language skills aren’t exactly common, but their numbers are increasing as IBM i shops with modernization intentions follow through on plans

New Financials At IBM Can’t Mask Growth Issues

April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is easy to say that the IBM we know today, or more precisely are trying to get to know as it undergoes its changes, is far different from the one that we were trying to understand two decades ago as it was going through another tumultuous transformation. The Big Blue from the middle 1990s was a systems company before and after that change, but it is harder to see the International Business Machines skeleton inside the new Big Blue.

But if you dig around, that core systems business is still there, even after IBM has completely reclassified its financials

IBM i 7.3: High Time For High Security

April 25, 2016 Dan Burger

How important is data confidentiality to you? On a scale of one to 10, it should be the only double-digit number you can choose. The risks for those unable to control and protect their information are far greater than ever before. The same thing will be said each year into the foreseeable future. So when looking for innovative ways to protect information, IBM acted by adding a tool called authority collection to the new i 7.3 release.

Call it a tool, a utility, or a capability authority collection is now built into the latest OS. The simplest explanation is that

Software Vendors Prep For IBM i 7.3, Applaud PDP for Testing

April 25, 2016 Alex Woodie

It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP).

There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic

Refacing Your Database, Part 2

April 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy

The whole purpose of refacing our database is to give proper names to tables and columns. So we have to spend some time ensuring that our names are right. In this article, the second in a series of three, we continue the refacing process by analyzing and correcting our new naming.

In my first article, we had reached the stage where we had extracted table and column definitions into our two conversion tables (TABLE_TRANSLATION and COLUMN_TRANSLATION), as shown below: