• Cisco’s UCS Mini Enters The Midrange Arena

  September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past five years, some remarkable changes have happened in the systems business. IBM‘s Power Systems business has dropped from around $5 billion down to around $3 billion and Cisco Systems has built a converged system business that has gone from zero to $3 billion. Cisco has gotten more than its fair share of the blade server market with green-field applications like private clouds and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and now it is looking both low and high to expand its business further. The fact that Cisco is trying to move from enterprise-class blade servers to minimalist machines

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• Admin Alert: What’s The Danger Zone For IBM i Disk Utilization?

  September 24, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  Working on IBM i and its predecessor machines for 30 years, I sometimes have to modify or redo advice that I’ve relied on for years. Case in point: how full does your disk space have to be before you put your IBM i partition in danger? I had an experience this month that made me question my assumptions on when you should worry about and how you should set your disk utilization thresholds. Here’s what happened. What Went Before In the past, I’ve recommended setting your disk utilization thresholds so that the IBM OS issues this system operator message when

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• A Bevy Of BIFs: %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

  September 24, 2014 Jon Paris

  This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that more people have V7.1 in their shops, I decided it was time to revisit the series and add it to the collection. It is probably my all-time favorite BIF . . . at least so far. Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through the target string and

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• Testing The Ruby Waters

  September 24, 2014 Aaron Bartell

  As of October 2013 Ruby is supported on IBM i via PowerRuby. This is good news as Ruby has become a very popular programming language for producing web applications because of its simplicity, flexibility, and vast community. In this article we will be introducing you to tools that aid in learning Ruby on IBM i. Often times the easiest way to learn a programming language is by starting small and playing with it. Ruby makes this very easy to do with its included Interactive Ruby Shell, or irb for short. The irb environment is also called REPL (Read,

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• Oracle Teams with Secure-24 for JD Edwards Hosting

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Oracle last week announced a partnership with the managed service provider (MSP) Secure-24 that will enable its ERP, CRM, and BI customers to leverage the MSP’s hosting services. The new service, dubbed Secure-24 Cloud Advantage for Oracle, uses the Virtual Compute Appliance (VCA), which Oracle says is a “wire once, software-defined converged infrastructure system” that can run Windows, Linux, or Solaris. Secure-24 has installed Oracle VCAs into two data centers, which form the backbone for the Secure-24 Cloud Advantage for Oracle service. The offering blends managed hosting and disaster recovery services into a single offering. Oracle says the service is

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• Liaison Gets MAD About Token Collisions

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Liaison Technologies last week announced it’s been granted a US patent for its Multiple Active Domains (MAD) tokenization technology, which eliminates the risk of the same token being generated for different values, or what’s known as a token collision. While it may sound somewhat whimsical, a token collision is no laughing matter. Token collisions can occur in large, geographically distributed organizations that have multiple data centers. When the same surrogate value, or token, is generated for different pieces of real data, a token collision has occurred, and the integrity of the data is lost. Liaison developed MAD to enable tokens

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• Interactive Reporting Gets a Boost at mrc

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  One of the most common uses of mrc‘s m-Power development tool is creating Web-based business intelligence and reporting applications. With a recent enhancement, mrc is giving users even more options for interactive reporting. Interactive reporting is one of a number of pre-built templates that m-Power users can use when they buy a subscription to the tool. The templates provide out-of-the-box capabilities for building interactive reporting applications that run on IBM i and other Java-enabled platforms. Chicago-based mrc made three main improvements to template. The first gives users the capability to modify row dimensions. With static reports, users can’t change

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• Bytware’s Messenger Syncs Up Monitoring

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Bytware is shipping version 8.1 of its message management products, MessengerConsole and MessengerPlus. The new release is aimed at ensuring that the various monitoring jobs and schedules are kept in sync across complex environments. The Messenger products automate IBM i operations by continuously monitoring message queues, logs, and journals for critical messages that could indicate failed jobs or backups, security breaches, printer or network errors, or problems with a high availability product. With version 8.1, Bytware says that MessengerConsole can now target “a specific system or systems for monitor synchronization.” This ensures that monitors can be sent to specific servers

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• MPG Discounts VIOS Tracker for PerfNav Customers

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Performance Group (MPG) has put together a superset of its performance management tools for IBM Power Systems environments. Navigator MAX bundles the Performance Navigator for IBM i and Power Navigator for AIX, Linux, and VIOS environments. MPG has been helping IBM i shops get the most out of their hardware investments since the days of the AS/400. The company’s Performance Navigator (“PerfNav”) offering is known as the go-to product for resellers and large shops embarking upon capacity planning and server-sizing exercises. When IBM joined the i5/OS and AIX worlds under the Power Systems umbrella, the Boulder, Colorado, company unveiled

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• EXTOL Bolsters B2B Tool for Complex Trading Environments

  September 23, 2014 Alex Woodie

  When you work in a complex supply chain, maintaining data and application integration points among multiple parties can be challenging. Make a change to one system, and it can have unforeseen impacts down the line. This is the sort of situation that EXTOL is looking to alleviate with the addition of “intelligent developer” features in the latest release of EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI). EBI is EXTOL’s flagship EDI and enterprise integration broker software for IBM i, Windows, and Linux. The Java-based suite delivers standard X12 and EDIFACT EDI functionality, but goes beyond that by adding next-gen AS2, FTP/S, and SMTP

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