• Get Your IBM i Audit On: Tips For A Smooth Deployment

  July 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  In today’s highly regulated environment, little is left to chance–including the possibility your IBM i security is misconfigured. One way to keep ahead of the auditors’ wrath is to become familiar with the auditing functions of the IBM i platform and to ensure it is set up correctly for your particular needs. Jeff Uehling, IBM‘s security architect for IBM i, recently provided some auditing tips in a webinar hosted by PowerTech. The advent of regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, and HITECH have raised the level of scrutiny on computer systems to uncomfortably high levels. While companies

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• Counting The Cost Of Power8 Systems

  July 14, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Now that IBM has put the four-core entry Power8 machine in the field to appease the processing and software group needs of a large portion of the IBM i installed base, it seems like now is a good time to finally get the price/performance analysis comparing Power7, Power7+, and Power8 machines out the door. There are many ways to dice and slice this, and I like to go through this methodically, as you all well know. I have already compared the base system configurations in terms of their feeds, speeds, price, and raw value for dollar based on IBM’s Commercial

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• Admin Alerts: Old IBM i Backups, New Tricks

  July 9, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  If you’re like most IBM i administrators, your backup routine is probably set in stone and you don’t really need to change it all that much. It’s solid and it works. But sometimes things happen and you may need to tweak your backup to accommodate new situations or needs. This week, let’s look at three different scenarios where you might have to change or modify your backup solution. Our Backup Scenarios Here are three different backup situations you may encounter that could force you to make some small but significant changes to your backup routines. Developing a new IBM i

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• Advantageous Options

  July 9, 2014 Ted Holt

  It happens to all of us. Someone tells us he needs a program just like an existing one, but with one small change. We clone the program, modify the clone, and now instead of one program to maintain when business requirements change, we have two. Before we know it, we have eight or 10 or more. Fortunately, there is a simple but seldom-used technique we can often use to avoid cloning programs. The technique to which I refer is to use an option parameter. An option parameter controls the behavior of a program. Contrast option parameters to data parameters, which

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• The Geezer’s Guide To Free-Form RPG, Part 4: Prototypes and Procedure Interfaces

  July 9, 2014 Jon Paris

  As promised in Part 3 of this Geezer’s Guide, this time I am going to be looking at the new support for prototypes and procedure interfaces. There are not a large number of enhancements in this area. Mostly they consist of improvements in the compiler’s use of defaults. Of course they also inherit all of the data definition enhancements in areas such as data type and length. Prototypes Let’s start with prototypes and see how they have changed. The basic building blocks are dcl-pr and dcl-parm. As with dcl-subf in data structures, the dcl-parm is optional and only needed when

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• EXTOL Finds New Partners for EDI

  July 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

  EDI and B2B integration software developer EXTOL International recently announced the establishment of relationships with three new business partners, including Effective Data, Primeur, and Melissa Data. The partnerships are expected to widen the breadth of services available to EXTOL’s largely IBM i-oriented customer base. Melissa Data is a provider of cloud-based data quality tools, which EXTOL customers now have access to through the new partnership announced last month. According to Pennsylvania-based EXTOL, its customers can now use Melissa’s services to cleanse, validate, and enhance their data as it’s being transformed, which will better enable customers to perform

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• m-Power Gains New ETL Capabilities

  July 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The m-Power development tool from mrc is gaining new extract, transform, and load (ETL) features with the goal of giving customers better business intelligence capabilities. Despite the growth of “big data” and the accelerating pace of development of big data solutions, nothing so far has replaced good old ETL when it comes to moving data from transactional systems into data warehouses for analysis. In fact, if anything, the need for ETL has increased due to the ever-growing volumes of data organizations are tasked with managing. The folks at mrc are looking to give their customers a leg up on ETL

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• Mesa Group Inks Exclusive Deal with IBS

  July 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBS last month tapped the Texas IT consultancy The Mesa Group to be its exclusive distributor in the Americas. It’s the latest in a series of moves by the Swedish ERP developer to solidify its business. The Mesa Group specializes in providing a range of IT-related services for Windows and IBM i systems, particularly in the fields of distribution, supply chain management, e-business, and customer service. The company, which is based near Dallas, sports partnerships with IBM i stalwarts like Linoma Software and GXS (formerly Inovis). Now you can count IBS as one more. “Our alignment with The Mesa Group

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• Intellinx Updated with Big-Data Fraud-Fighting Power

  July 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The Israeli security software company Intellinx is now supporting the distributed Hadoop file system with its flagship insider fraud detection solution, which also supports IBM i and the System z mainframe. Intellinx is used by a number of large institutions and banks to keep a watchful eye on the activities of employees. The offering uses an agent-less approach to capture application data directly from the network, which provides a very detailed forensic audit trail into user activity. In IBM i and System z environments, its capability to view user activity and keystrokes by tapping directly into the 5250 and 3270

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• UCG Grows BaaS Biz with VAULT400

  July 8, 2014 Dan Burger

  Cloud-based backup and recovery services and remote hardware for disaster recovery and high availability continues to attract IBM midrange shops and United Computer Group has become a trusted partner with many of them. Last week, the Cleveland, Ohio-based company announced two more companies that have decided to contract with UCG for what is being referred to as backup as a service, or BaaS. Carswell, a provider of information services for legal, tax, finance, and human resource professionals based in Canada, and the city of San Ramon, California, are the latest in a string of organizations choosing to work with UCG.

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