• Power8 Iron Gets New I/O Options

  June 1, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the rollout of slightly faster processors for the entry Power8 processors and the fleshing out of the high-end of the Power Systems line a month ago, IBM rolled out a bunch of new peripheral features and a new set of peripheral expansion units that will allow for Power8 shops both high and low to expand the amount of PCI-Express 3.0 peripherals that companies can attach to their systems than is currently possible on these machines. Such I/O and storage expansion is important, given the ever-increasing amount of compute and memory that is being put into ever-smaller system

  … Read more

• BCD Tweaks Web Dev Tools. . . Focal Point Updates DR FlashCopy. . . Boadway Puts IBM i Performance Data on the Cloud. . .

  May 20, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Rounding out our IT Jungle coverage of the recent COMMON conference held at Disneyland last month, we bring you product news from three IBM i software companies focusing on Web development and modernization, hosted high availability and disaster recovery, and IBM i performance tuning. BCD Tweaks Web Dev Tools by Alex Woodie BCD Software used the recent COMMON conference as a launch pad for new releases of two key Web development tools: Presto 6.1 and WebSmart 10.8. BCD ships two editions of WebSmart, including ILE RPG and PHP editions, but the features in version 10.8 focus mainly (though not entirely)

  … Read more

• Kisco Rolls with 2FA, Revs Network Security Tool

  May 20, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Data security isn’t just nice to have–it’s the law in most industries. One of the best ways to keep unauthorized users from snooping where their snouts don’t belong is two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires users to have two pieces of identifying credentials before being granted entry. A new 2FA solution for IBM i was launched recently by Kisco Information Systems, which also updated its exit point monitoring program for IBM i. Kisco’s 2FA solution, called i2Pass, puts a roadblock in front of attempts to access IBM i assets. If the users have the correct credentials–which is the combination of

  … Read more

• ARCAD Release Management Fits With UrbanCode DevOps

  May 20, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s midrange computers and the applications they run never seem to get the recognition they deserve when it comes to advanced technologies and methodologies. It’s not exactly stealing intellectual property, but it is dishonest to represent “new” ideas as if they were freshly hatched. DevOps is a good example. It’s a hot idea, but it also shares a lot of methodology with the IBM i and its predecessors, the iSeries and AS/400. At the heart of DevOps is the change process and adding agility and speed to that process. “It is not new in our field when you think

  … Read more

• Shield Goes Lean and Mean with HA Software

  May 20, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is shipping a new release of its IBM i high availability software that weighs significantly less than previous releases, and should consume fewer resources as well, thereby boosting performance. The HA audit and role swap processes were also enhanced with HA4i version 7.2, and the user interface also saw some improvements. IBM remote journaling, which forms the basis for the majority of HA products on the market, is a fantastic technology, as it moves the replication of database files underneath the operating system layer, and in the process makes it nearly foolproof to use. But the flipside

  … Read more

• Hadoop and IBM i: Not As Far Apart As One Might Think

  May 20, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The worlds of IBM i and Apache Hadoop appear to be diametrically opposed. One is a proprietary, RISC-based platform used primarily to run transactional systems. The other is an open source, X86-based platform used primarily for big data analytics. But as far apart as the two platforms seem to be, at least one IBM i software vendor, mrc, is aiming to find some common ground between them. Hadoop is a distributed data storage and processing framework that engineers and researchers at Yahoo and Google are credited with helping to create. While indexing the Internet was Hadoop’s first use case,

  … Read more

• Job User Name And Current Job User

  May 19, 2015 Patrick Botz

  I see developers make one mistake way more often than any other. They assume that the job user name also represents the user profile under which a job is currently executing. This is, and always has been, an invalid assumption. The job user name only represents the userID under which the job was originally started. The user profile that a job is executing under at any given point in time (i.e., the current user) may or may not be the same as the job user. This may seem like a trivial and harmless mistake. But it often isn’t. In previous

  … Read more

• Prevent Overlapping In Range Tables

  May 19, 2015 Ted Holt

  In Joining On Ranges, I demonstrated that range tables are a practical replacement for attribute columns. As a rule, ranges should not overlap. (Perhaps there are exceptions.) Here’s why, and also what to do to prevent overlapping values. Overlapping ranges cause too many rows of the range table to join to a single row of another table, which in turn causes too many rows in the result set. For example, assume the following range table. FROMITEMNUMBER THRUITEMNUMBER ITEMCATEGORY 134 134999 1 1341 134199 1 488 488999 2 2 299999 3 Item 134120 would join to the first two rows

  … Read more

• Native Regular Expressions In DB2 For i 7.1 And 7.2

  May 19, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  Blast it! Another suite of custom code I have written and used over the years has recently been deprecated (or partially deprecated) by IBM. The good news is that regular expressions (abbreviated RegEx) are now a native part of DB2 featuring one new predicate (REGEXP_LIKE) and four new scalar functions: REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_SUBSTR, and REGEXP_REPLACE. For IBM i 7.1, TR9 must be installed and for IBM i 7.2, TR1 must be installed. The new Regular Expression Functions Require licensed product #39 5770-SS1 International Components for Unicode to be installed on both IBM i 7.1 and 7.2. (This product is

  … Read more

• IBM i Shops Running Oracle JDE Consider MSPs And Migration

  May 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  GSI is an application and technology consulting company specializing in helping companies that run JD Edwards ERP software. As IBM i history buffs know, JD Edwards software solely ran on IBM midrange systems back in the day. An estimated 25 percent run on IBM i today, which still means hundreds of i shops find themselves caught between a rock (IBM) and a hard place (Oracle). And let’s say GSI is a company trying to ease the pain. When GSI began its JD Edwards support business in 2004, 90 percent of its customers ran IBM AS/400s (later

  … Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles