• Ops Dashboard Gives Centralized View Into IBM i Performance

  November 9, 2015 Alex Woodie

  If your company is like most IBM i shops, the system is a critical part of your daily business. Whether you are packing consumer goods, reconciling bank statements, or delivering medical care, chances are the IBM i server plays a central role. But all too often, getting a single view into the state of the machine is difficult to achieve. That is what drove HelpSystems to release a consolidated operations dashboard with performance drill-down capabilities. The new operations dashboard that HelpSystems has unveiled allows users to monitor the state of their IBM i servers from the comfort of a mobile

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• Spring Ahead, Fall Behind

  November 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of us have been in this community for a long time, and whether or not we mean to, some of us still call our platform the AS/400, or “the four hundred,” or even the iSeries because old habits die hard. Call it what you will, but this is still a community, and it is one that we are members of and, for the most part, one we are all proud to be members. I, for one, wish that we had a better sense of the breadth and depth of this community, something a bit more than just the results

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• IBM i Development Team Considering Native .NET

  November 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Zero tolerance for AIX. It’s an exaggeration, but not that much of an exaggeration within the IBM midrange community. There is a small amount of tolerance. And where there is tolerance, the seeds of open source have an opportunity to sprout and grow. PHP has shown that open source can be accepted as a viable application development environment. Ruby, Python, and Node.js are relatively new to the platform and are trying to gain a foothold. Now get ready for open source .NET. Don’t expect IBM to drop .NET on your doorstep next week, next month, or next year. But it’s

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• Raz-Lee Adds Self-Auditing Feature to Security Products

  November 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  “Who polices the police?” That’s the question many CIOs are asking as they clamp down on potential security exposures in response to increasingly strict regulations. Now Raz-Lee Security is working to reduce the suspicion surrounding IBM i system administrators (i.e., the server cops) by building self-auditing capabilities directly into its security tools. In many IBM i shops, the system administrator is typically the most powerful user on the system. This jack-of-all-trades is often called upon to do the work that would be covered by a security officer in bigger shops running open systems. It’s common to give the “keys to

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• Komodo Launches Hosted Splunk Service for IBM i

  November 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that would like to start using Splunk to analyze their log data, but don’t want the hassle of setting Splunk up themselves, have a new option available to them. Last month Komodo Cloud announced that it’s now offering a cloud-based analytics service designed specifically using Splunk with IBM i-generated data. Over the past decade, Splunk has developed a solid reputation for its capability to analyze big data generated by machines. Its NoSQL-based software does the hard work of capturing, indexing, and correlating vast amounts of semi-structured data generated by servers, applications, network devices, mobile devices, and practically

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• Tango/04 Boosts IT-Business Alignment Capabilities

  November 4, 2015 Dan Burger

  Much of the alignment of IT and business processes can be better served with automated monitoring and management. In the IBM midrange community, systems management is a highly desirable and sometimes implemented capability. But automation has moved beyond the parameters that were set when the AS/400 and iSeries environments were the workhorses in the stable. There are new frontiers being explored by companies such as Tango/04 and its Alignia lineup of infrastructure, middleware, and application monitoring software. Tango takes the approach of managing infrastructure according to business needs. The company calls it business service management. It can be explained by

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• Crossroads Drops Rack Requirement, Adds De-Dupe in VTL

  November 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Mega-huge data centers are hot topics in the news, but mom and pop businesses often run their IBM i servers in cozy little data closets. This fact drove Crossroads Systems to launch a workstation version of its SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) that doesn’t require a rack. The Texas company also gave a preview of upcoming VTL features, including data de-duplication across the wire. Crossroads debuted the SPHiNX WS at the Fall COMMON Conference and Expo last month. With 3 TB of usable storage (expandable to 6 TB) and a starting price point of $6,800, the new VTL with the

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• IBM i Executives: Where Are They Now?

  November 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Anybody remember Buell Duncan, who presided over his iSeries flock with a smooth Texas drawl? Or Colin Parris, who brought a doctorate degree in electrical engineering to his IBM i tenure? If you’ve been watching IBM for very long, you’ll know the company shifts around its top executives on a regular basis. But where are those former IBM i execs now, and what are they doing? The news might surprise you. Like lots of big, diverse companies, Big Blue likes to groom its leaders by giving them a wide range of assignments, which means that, over the past 20 years,

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• Extracting Sample Data From A DB2 for i Table

  November 3, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  The need to retrieve a sample or subset of data from a database is a relatively common (and somewhat annoying) task. For example, DB2 for i developers often want to extract data and create a scaled down copy of a library (a.k.a. schema) to develop with. Additionally, sometimes code testing can be done using random data, such as creating a battery of orders to process with varying customers, order terms, etc. This tip won’t attempt to tackle the full breadth of either of these scenarios. However, the aim is to show how some simple queries can be used to create

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• Why And How To Update The HMC

  November 3, 2015 Larry Bolhuis

  I deliver a session on the HMC to many user groups, including COMMON. Attendance had been falling, so COMMON’s education team had decided to give the session just one more go. This time though I walked into a packed house, with people carrying in chairs and standing along the walls! “What brings you all here at 8 a.m.?” I asked. “You’re going to talk about updating the HMC, right?” was the response. You see IBM had just announced POWER6 severs, and that mandated newer code on the HMC. Some of you may wonder what an HMC is, so let’s

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