• Mad Dog 21/21: Curate’s Eggs

  January 20, 2014 Hesh Wiener

  Bring Your Own Device is turning business computing inside out. Corporate support squads are now obliged to cope with free range users’ diverse machines. Gadgets running iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Chrome can give support personnel acute headaches, but they aren’t the most nefarious ones. The worst annoyances come from weakly managed Windows, which becomes infested by browser cooties like the Ask Toolbar, smuggled in during Java updates, or the McAfee Siteadvisor, subversively installed when Flash is patched. In the BYOD looking glass world, Windows can be less practical than any of the mobile operating systems. A key

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• Old Code And High Maintenance

  January 20, 2014 Dan Burger

  There are old RPG applications that just run and run. Minimal maintenance is required and the people who depend on these apps couldn’t be happier. But, you may have heard, this bliss is not universal. More often, application maintenance gets sloppy as the fingerprints of many coders, some perhaps with dubious credentials, takes a toll. Add a growing demand that applications do more and rely on data from multiple systems. New demands and old apps make for an odd couple. Talk with an RPG programmer who deals with old code in a high maintenance circumstance and one that requires old

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• Key Info Unlocks Its Cloud

  January 20, 2014 Dan Burger

  Key Information Systems, the IBM midrange platform reseller and systems integrator, has flipped the switch on its new data center featuring Power Systems as the key component in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. This is a natural progression from the acquisition of ISWest in August. The Key Cloud is designed to assist current and prospective customers, particularly those with Power System iron with hosted options and managed services for at least some of their enterprise IT requirements. The idea that many organizations no longer require the physical, on-premise presence of computer hardware, at least not to the

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• IBM Winds Down Older CPU And Memory Ahead Of Power8

  January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the new year, and Big Blue is prepping for the Power8 system launch as well as updates to the IBM i and sometime around the middle of the year. IBM likes to give customers plenty of warning when there is a maintenance price hike or when it will be withdrawing certain processors and features from the market, and last week it fired off the first announcement of 2014 that shows the company is gearing up for Power8. Expect more announcements, perhaps better deals to encourage customers to move up to Power7+ machines rather than wait for the Power8

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• Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 2

  January 15, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  In December, I began discussing four different approaches for moving an IBM i partition from an existing machine to a new location and the different tasks needed for each technique. I talked about using traditional system back-up and restore migration techniques last issue. This issue, I’ll focus on using high availability (HA) software to migrate a partition. Four Ways To Move An IBM i To review, there are four techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a different machine: Restore the partition in place or to a new location using the same system name. This is a traditional restore

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• Dynamic Compound Statements In DB2 For i

  January 15, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  Dynamic compound statements are sure to be one of the most oft used new SQL features in IBM i 7.1. In general, this feature allows developers to execute a complex set of SQL statements that include variable use, error handling, and conditional logic on the fly without creating a permanent SQL routine such as a function or stored procedure. Dynamic compound statements makes DB2 similar to other database platforms like SQL Server where SQL scripts can be written and executed on the fly. This feature comes in DB2 for i group PTF level 26, so make sure your database PTFs

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• Where Did My Faulting Guidelines Go?

  January 15, 2014 Doug Mewmaw

  I remember when I first started in the industry how difficult performance management was, especially in the area of memory. The good news was IBM provided clear defined service levels in regards to memory pools. I’m not sure what year I discovered the guidelines, maybe in the 1980s, but I do remember that the published guidelines were so easy. In fact, I can still see the faded yellow sticky note on my desk with the following guidelines. After managing the box for years and attending numerous performance sessions and the like, I discovered the guidelines were not only not talked

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• Medical Supply Firm Protects Data with Vault400

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A.A. Laquis Limited, a medical supply distributor in the Caribbean, has selected the Vault400 offering from United Computer Group to protect its critical IBM i server, the vendor announced last month. With 150,000 square feet of distribution space in Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and Jamaica and more than 200 employees, A.A. Laquis Limited is the biggest supplier of medical supplies and home healthcare supplies in the Caribbean. The privately held company uses an IBM i server equipped with ERP software from VAI to automate its back-office operations. The distributor selected Vault400 after looking at the other alternatives available on the

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• Symtrax Debuts Compleo Print Manager

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Printing a document from within an ERP application can sometimes be a challenge. With a new solution from Symtrax called Compleo Print Manager, users can control printing from ERP systems within the comfort of a Web-based interface. Symtrax’s new Print Manager offering is designed to be a secure and central repository for configuring and controlling printers within an ERP landscape. The software utilizes existing Windows print drivers to reduce the chances that the print drivers are incompatible with a particular ERP product. In addition to configuring printers, the software helps to optimize printer options, thereby enabling it to initiate printing

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• Heartland Taps Help/Systems for IBM i Job Scheduling

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Job scheduling is one of those things that you may not pay a lot of attention to. For the folks at Heartland Financial, keeping track of IBM i and Windows jobs manually worked just find–right up to the day it didn’t. And that’s when it brought in Help/Systems and its Robot/SCHEDULER to automate the situation. Heartland Financial USA is a $5.7 billion multi-bank holding company providing banking, mortgage, wealth management, brokerage, and insurance services to clients in the Midwest and the West. The publicly traded company is considered one of the top 100 bank holding companies in the US. An

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