• Leaders, Team Players, Power Systems Advocates Wanted For COMMON Board

  September 15, 2014 Dan Burger

  Volunteering has a much larger impact on your community than most people think. And if you narrow that down to the IBM midrange community, the same is true: The impact of volunteers is both underestimated and underappreciated. There is an economic impact that adds a financial spark to the IBM i platform by creating and organizing advocates who are also helping themselves professionally through networking, education, and mentoring. There is a personal feeling of being connected and giving back to the community and keeping it strong. And then there are social benefits that are tied into all of the above.

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• Integration Eases Free-Format RPG Migrations

  September 15, 2014 Dan Burger

  The capability to convert fixed form RPG to free form RPG is one of the most far-reaching enhancements to the IBM i operating system. Last week, two members of the IBM i ISV community formed a partnership that could benefit organizations that are ready to take advantage of this feature, which was introduced with IBM i 7.1 TR7. The software change management company Remain Software and the RPG modernization firm Linoma Software are combining efforts to ease the migration of RPG applications to free-format, a process that is considered a wise investment in legacy IBM i assets. Linoma’s RPG Toolbox

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• LTO Roadmap Extended To Gen 10

  September 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The companies that make up the Linear Tape Open consortium last week announced the ninth and tenth generations of the open standard. When the first drives based on LTO Gen 10 technology start shipping–ostensibly around the year 2020, if the historical release pace holds up–the drives will be able to write data at the rate of more than 1 GB per second and hold more than 120 TB on each cartridge. The current LTO Gen 6 drives started hitting the market in late 2012, about 24 months after the LTO Gen 5 drives appeared. They offer a native capacity of

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Crimea River

  September 15, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  Generally speaking, war is a male pursuit. Women warriors, Amazons, are an exception. Generally speaking, public company capitalism is about profit, with emphasis on near term earnings. Amazon.com, taking the long view while favoring revenue, is an exception. The Amazon women’s tribe mythology is huge, and it is consistent with the findings of archeologists; they say that dramatically matriarchal societies are threads in the fabric of European civilization. Amazon.com exhibits unusual behavior, too; it succeeds far beyond the expectations of skeptics, confounding and punishing gainsayers who put bearish money where their grousing pie-holes lie. Amazon: Ancient Greeks spun fabulous myths

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• More Power8 Announcements Coming Next Month

  September 15, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like you should pencil in the first week of October for some pretty big Power Systems announcements from IBM. We know that IBM has planned to get some additional Power Systems machines in the field before the end of the year, and it is looking like the big event will be at the Enterprise2014 conference that Big Blue is hosting in Las Vegas. Enterprise2014 is the third big event that IBM is putting on in Vegas this year, and the theme of the conference is “the infrastructure for cloud, data, and engagement.” That pretty much covers everything

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• IBM i Upgrades Not All On The Same Path

  September 15, 2014 Dan Burger

  There are many IBM midrange shops that recognize the value of investing in and implementing the new capabilities in the IBM i operating system. Sometimes we lose sight of that because there’s no tidal wave of OS upgrades on the heels of major new releases. There never has been. It’s more like the steady flow of a river, which looks calm on the surface and belies the activity that goes unseen. You can get a glimpse of that by talking with someone like Pete Massiello. His company, iTech Solutions Group, is on schedule to do 150 IBM i OS

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• Big Blue To Sunset IBM i 6.1 A Year From Now

  September 15, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world turns, time marches on, and versions and releases of operating systems come and go. Big Blue put out the IBM i 7.2 software release concurrent with the Power8 “scale-out” systems launch at the end of April, an update to the integrated software stack that was tuned to take advantage of the new hardware. In with the new, out with the old, and that means IBM i 6.1 customers better get prepared to do an upgrade or find budget to pay for extended support contracts for the software. In announcement letter 914-181, IBM is warning customers that it

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• Actifio Takes Unique Storage Approach to the Cloud

  September 11, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Actifio is carving out a niche in the backup and data de-duplication market with its unique Copy Data Storage (CDS) approach that eliminates the need for companies to store multiple copies of data. This summer, the vendor announced that its pushing the core CDS technology into the cloud to enable disaster recovery (DR) in enterprise applications, and it’s already being adopted by a major DR service provider, Sungard Availability Services. Companies typically have many copies of their data floating around in various silos, including production, backup, archive, data warehousing, development, test, and more. Millions are spent keeping up with

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• Actifio Takes Unique Storage Approach to the Cloud

  September 11, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Actifio is carving out a niche in the backup and data de-duplication market with its unique Copy Data Storage (CDS) approach that eliminates the need for companies to store multiple copies of data. This summer, the vendor announced that its pushing the core CDS technology into the cloud to enable disaster recovery (DR) in enterprise applications, and it’s already being adopted by a major DR service provider, Sungard Availability Services. Companies typically have many copies of their data floating around in various silos, including production, backup, archive, data warehousing, development, test, and more. Millions are spent keeping up with

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• Admin Alert: Importing IBM i Spooled Files Into Excel

  September 10, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  For a recent audit, I had to export IBM i spooled file data into Excel spreadsheets to send to our auditors. If you have a similar need for spooled file to Excel conversion, here’s my drill for importing spool file data into an Excel 2010 spreadsheet. One Goal, Two Paths You can export spooled file data to an Excel file in two ways: by using a commercial product or by using System i Navigator and the Text Import Wizard from Microsoft Excel 2010. If you have a third-party product that exports spooled files to Excel format, then by all means

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