• Help/Systems Buys Dartware To Build Out Heterogeneous Monitoring

  January 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Systems management, security, and analytics software maker Help/Systems continued on its acquisition tear as 2012 came to a close, and last week announced that it had bought Dartware, which peddles a popular system monitoring tool called InterMapper. The move will allow Help/Systems to better expand into the Windows, Linux, and Unix system management, monitoring, and job scheduling markets that are adjacent to the OS/400 and IBM i market that it grew out of. Dartware comes out of the networking corridor that wraps around Boston and extends into New Hampshire. (There’s a reason Network World magazine was up there, after

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• What’s Happening In IBM i App Dev?

  January 14, 2013 Dan Burger

  Green screens scare the daylights (actually not my first choice of words) out of me. Like great white sharks and vampire bats, they have their place in the world. But I don’t want to go to that place. Most people would probably agree with me about the sharks and the bats. There are many RPG and COBOL programmers, however, who are perfectly comfortable in a green-screen world. What in the name of modern application development are they thinking? There is a reason people use the term computer science rather than computer history. IT is an ongoing endeavor. You have probably

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• Admin Alert: Four Things To Do For Your IBM i In 2013

  January 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  A new year always brings new challenges in administering your IBM i machines. Here are the top four things on my 2013 calendar that IBM i shops should look at in 2013, starting this month. #1: Check Your Job Scheduling Date Objects In January If you haven’t already done so, look at any date-dependent job processing objects on your system and change them to ensure that they will still work correctly in 2013. These objects might include: Any data areas that affect date processing. Files that need to go through yearly purge routines. Any RUN and OMIT date objects that

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• Tracing Routines Explain Why The Computer Did What It Did

  January 9, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Every week someone asks me why the computer did what it did. For instance, not long ago a buyer asked me why the computer did not send our requirements for a certain item to the vendor who supplies the item. I started digging through the program that generates the files we send to vendors. Then I realized there was a better way. Let me tell you about it. In many shops, business rules are embedded in source code. Sometimes rules are hard-coded. I’ve seen code that directly referred

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• What’s New With CPYFRMIMPF And CPYTOIMPF?

  January 9, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  As my years as a developer whiz by, I often find myself ignorant of the newest features available. For example, I’ve used the Copy From Import File (CPYFRMIMPF) and Copy To Import File (CPYTOIMPF) commands so often that I just became (as my old boss used to say) “fat, dumb, and happy” when using them, not realizing IBM has added new features since the time I first studied these commands. I’ll briefly share a few of the relatively recent enhancements to these commands. First of all, in i7.1 Technology Refresh 5 (TR5), CPYTOIMPF has been enhanced with a new parameter

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• Infinite to Migrate IBM i Apps for Department of the Interior

  January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Infinite Software announced last month that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) to migrate RPG applications off the IBM i platform. Laguna Niguel, California-based Infinite Software will migrate several of DOI’s RPG applications to the AIX operating system and the Oracle database, according to Raquela Kaplan, marketing director for Infinite. “The key issue here is to migrate to a more open IBM platform,” Kaplan stated in a press release. “The client wanted the ability to write future data to Oracle in a seamless manner. The Infinite i solution is a perfect fit.”

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• Pinnacle Business Systems Buys Minneapolis IT Firm

  January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Pinnacle Business Systems, the IBM i software developer and IT service provider based in Edmond, Oklahoma, last week announced the acquisition of St. Croix Solutions, an IT service provider based near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pinnacle Business Systems (PBS) is renown in the IBM i world for employing the original developers of BRMS, the backup and recovery product that’s part of the IBM i OS. Today, PBS sells three IBM i solutions, including icom/400 for System i, a message monitoring and alerting tool; trac/400 for System i, a backup and recovery and media management tool; and ups/400 for System i,

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• Quantum Unleashes LTO 6 Tape Drives

  January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Storage giant Quantum is now shipping LTO 6 gear, including drives, cartridges, autoloaders, and libraries. The company says it will support the latest super tape drive format with its storage virtualization software for big data, called StorNext, in early 2013. Quantum announced the availability of its LTO 6 lineup in late November. At the heart of Quantum’s LTO 6 offering is a SAS-connected half-height drive. Quantum sells four general editions of this drive, including versions that can be installed in a tape library or autoloader; a rack; used on a standalone basis; or installed with a PCI Express host bus

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• EVault Hooks Up with Fujitsu for DR Clouds

  January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  EVault and Fujitsu are teaming up in a strategic partnership that will see Fujitsu launch a series of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions based on EVault’s technology. EVault is a major provider of online backup and cloud-based DR solutions. More than 38,000 organizations use EVault’s technology, either as direct customers of EVault or as customers of EVault’s partners. The company, which is a subsidiary of publicly traded disk giant Seagate Technology, doesn’t break out a specific revenue figure, but it figures to be a pretty healthy slice of Seagate’s software and services business. Now you can count

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• Top 10 Best and/or Worst Top 10 Lists

  January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The beginning of the year is a great time to reminisce on the past 12 months, think ahead to the next 12 months, make a resolution or two, and, of course, ponder the seeming endless top 10 lists generated at this time of year. We’ve saved you the effort of looking at the best and the worst top 10 lists of the New Year with our first top 10 list of the best and worst top 10 lists. We’ll start with the top five best Top 10 lists: Number One: “Top Ten Predictions for the Global ERP Industry in 2013,”

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