• Maxava Says HA Cloud Business Is Booming

  November 19, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The hosted high availability (HA) software business is taking off in a big way for Maxava. The company claims to have between 150 and 200 customers utilizing its software through the cloud, and that cloud deals now account for half of its sales pipeline. This led the company to lay claim earlier this month to being the number one provider of cloud-based HA software in the IBM i market. IT Jungle spoke with Maxava’s senior vice president Simon O’Sullivan last week to give him a chance to back up the big claims Maxava was making about its presence in

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• IBM Mothballs QLogic InfiniBand Switches, Power Systems Drives

  November 15, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years, IBM didn’t have its own network and storage switching business, and it OEMed or resold products from others, including gear from Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications, Voltaire (which was eaten by Mellanox Technologies two years ago), Juniper, and Blade Network Technologies. Since that time, Cisco has jumped into the server biz, IBM bought BNT, and Intel bought the InfiniBand biz from QLogic (among many other deals that did not directly affect Big Blue). Now, IBM is paring back on its catalog a bit, and it looks like QLogic is being shown the door on Power

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• LANSA Launches LongRange University

  November 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  LANSA last week announced LongRange University, a series of free online videos aimed at helping customers learn how to make the most effective use of LongRange, the IBM i-based mobile application development tool that it launched earlier this year. LongRange enables IBM i developers to use their RPG, COBOL, and CL skills to develop mobile applications that run natively on iOS and Android. The software–which consists of a server component for IBM i, a development studio that lives in Windows, and a mobile client device–works by transforming DDS display files residing in IBM i programs into graphical displays that are

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• Admin Alert: A Checklist For Performing IBM i Planned Maintenance

  November 14, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Taking down an IBM i system for planned system maintenance involves more than just performing the maintenance itself. To keep processing running without issue, you need to ensure that the machine ends cleanly before maintenance begins and that it restarts smoothly after maintenance completes. To that end, here’s a starter checklist for how to take down and restart an IBM i machine during planned system maintenance. The Phases Of System Maintenance When planning IBM i system maintenance, it’s helpful to divide the maintenance up into three sets of tasks that you must successfully complete. These task sets are: Pre-maintenance tasks

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• Use SQL To Update A Sequence Number

  November 14, 2012 Hey, Ted

  Is it possible to use a single SQL statement to assign an ascending sequence number to a column in a table? I’d like the sequence number to start at 10 and increment by 10 as every row is updated so that the number column in the updated rows would be 10, 20, 30, etc. –Doug I know a way, Doug. However, let me say up front that I’ve only played with this. That is, I’ve never used it in a production environment. I can’t speak to how practical it might be or what you might need to watch out for.

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• Converting CASE in CL

  November 14, 2012 Bob Cozzi

  When I write CL, I long for some of the ease-of-use features IBM added over the last 10 years to RPG IV. Simple things like %XLATE or %SCAN or %EDITC would be nice. For example, a client of mine had a CL program that required several parameters, one of which was a user ID. However, the non-IBM i platform on which that information was entered did not automatically convert lowercase letters to all uppercase. When the program would try to verify the user profile, it would almost always fail. Initially my client wanted to use one of the legacy APIs

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• IBM Deals On PowerSC Security Wares, And IBM i Hooks In

  November 13, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, it takes a while for something to sink into my thick skull. I have known for a while that IBM has a security software layer called PowerSC, short for security and compliance, and I figured that given all the built-in security in the IBM i platform as well as the several add-ons from third-party vendors, this was not something we need to worry about. But, of course, the PowerVM hypervisor and AIX partitions running on Power Systems machines at your site need to be locked down. And that is what PowerSC is all about. PowerSC was launched back in

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• Infinite Claims No Rewriting Necessary in COBOL Migration

  November 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infinite Corporation last week announced that it helped an unnamed financial services firm migrate a multi-million line COBOL application from IBM i to X86 Linux without a lick of rewriting. “The Infinite Project Management team used Infinite’s Infinite i toolset to recompile and deploy the COBOL applications under Linux without having to rewrite a single line of code,” says Infinite’s Raquela Kaplan in a press release. Instead of running under IBM i servers, the application is now running on X86-based Linux servers and the Oracle database. Kaplan says that the company is able to utilize data from the migrated COBOL

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• Constellation Buys Two More Software Firms, Releases 3Q Figures

  November 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  We’re 13 days into November, and the hungry software conglomerate Constellation Software has already gobbled up two more software firms, including a German developer of Windows-based ERP systems for window companies, and a UK developer of payment collection software. The Canadian software company also announced financial results for its third quarter. Constellation announced yesterday that it signed a definitive agreement to buy the Albat+Wirsam Software GmbH (A+W) business from Glaston, a global manufacturer of glass processing technology that’s based in Finland. The deal currently carries a price tag of €18 million (about $23 million), but the price is contingent.

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• Progress Unveils Cloud Data Connector

  November 13, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Progress Software last week unveiled DataDirect Cloud, a new data integration service designed to access cloud-based databases, such as those running on Salesforce.com, Amazon Relational Data Service, and Microsoft SQL Azure, from on-premise tools and business intelligence software. The software is entering beta tests and is expected to be available next year. DataDirect Cloud uses standard ODBC and JDBC drivers to access cloud-based data sources, just as Progress subsidiary DataDirect‘s on-premise integration tools are used to access on-premise databases, such as Oracle 11g, SQL Server, DB2/400, and other data sources. The new offering eliminates the need to learn

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