• Power Systems Power Through Server Downturn

  June 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There were two bright spots in the server racket in the first quarter of this year, according to market researcher Gartner, and one of them was IBM‘s Power Systems iron. The other, of course, was the cohort of X86 server makers, who are gnawing at the flesh of Unix and proprietary server makers while the Unix vendors are busy taking pieces out of one another’s hides. The economy is still jittery in a number of parts of the world, and the server biz is losing a bit of its oomph. But don’t get the wrong idea. There’s a

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• IBM Puffs Up New Public, Private SmartCloud Releases

  June 4, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just like any other product, public and private clouds have to change and evolve to get more relevant and to keep pace with the competition. IBM has made a lot of promises with its SmartCloud private cloud infrastructure, which you install in your data center to create virtual cloudy server and storage slices, and its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ clouds, which Big Blue launched a little more than a year ago and said it would flesh out a bit more. With a bunch of announcements just before the Memorial Day holiday here in the United States, IBM is making good

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• As I See It: Pocket Litter

  June 1, 2012 Victor Rozek

  For those in the “pocket litter” collection business, things are looking up. They’ve got a project with a $2 billion budget, courtesy of us the taxpayers, and a whopping 10,000 contractors who, as we speak, are building an ugly but exceedingly spacious data center to be filled with high tech toys. And, overruns will not be a problem. If you’re a supercomputer maker, server provider, or manufacturer of storage devices and count the NSA among your customers, these are equally heady times. You’re probably ecstatic, hyperventilating with anticipation. You’re going to sell a lot of hardware, and overruns are almost

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• Three Ways To Fix NetServer Access Problems

  May 30, 2012 Hey, Joe

  I tried mapping a Windows drive letter to the root folder (/) of my Integrated File System (IFS) by using an IBM i NetServer file share. But I can’t get the drive to map. My cubicle buddy can map her drive. Why can’t I map my drive? –Phil Just as your IBM i user profile can be disabled from signing on to the system after a set number of incorrect sign-on attempts, the system can also automatically disable your user profile from IBM i NetServer access after you exceed the maximum number of sign-on attempts when trying to access a

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• Eliminate The Legitimate Use Of GOTO

  May 30, 2012 Ted Holt

  Today I want to share with you some of the ugliest RPG code I’ve ever seen. It is to me the programming-language equivalent of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, and I am its progenitor. Then I will tell you why I wrote this code, and why, despite its ugliness, the code was correct. Last, I will tell you how to “prettify” it. The ugly code of which I speak is in a template source code member for file maintenance programs. It is similar in structure to this example: P MoveItem b D pi D inItemID 6a const D inWhsID

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• Preparing To Install IBM’s RUNSQL Command

  May 30, 2012 Rob Berendt

  I’ve often needed to run a SQL statement from within a CL program. I knew I could by calling a RPG program with SQL embedded in it, or by executing RUNSQLSTM, but I really didn’t want to go to that much trouble to run one simple SQL statement. IBM has given you a way to run an SQL command within a CL procedure if you’re running IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. It’s a new CL command called RUNSQL. For 7.1, you must order level 14 or higher of DB2 PTF Group SF99701. For 6.1, order level 25 or higher of

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• CA Product Manager Bill Hunt: 1964-2012

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Bill Hunt, the principle product manager for the 2E and Plex development tools at CA Technologies, died May 1 after a battle with cancer. He was just 47. For the last 12 years, Hunt had been the driving force behind the 2E/Plex product line at CA. He was very active in the 2E/Plex community, and worked closely with customers and partners who use the high-level development tools, which continues to have a loyal following in the IBM i community. The following statement was posted to the CA Plex CA 2E Global User Community website by Marie Godfrey, senior director

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• Data Storage Adds IBM i Servers to Cloud Data Center

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Data Storage Corp. recently added more IBM i processing power to its Massachusetts data center in preparation for expanding its portfolio of cloud services, which range from data protection to production hosting. DSC last week announced that it has completed the first two phases of its three-part expansion plan at its SAS70 type II data center in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company now has a range of Power5-, Power6-, and Power7-based servers in place to address the IBM i computing needs of its customers. Data protection continues to be DSC’s forte on the IBM i platform, particularly after its 2010 acquisition

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• Tributary Brings Storage Director to IBM i 6.1, 7.1 Environments

  May 22, 2012 Dan Burger

  Tributary Systems has introduced its latest version of Storage Director, its software offering that provides backup storage virtualization. Storage Director version 3.04 introduces support for IBM i 6.1, 7.1 and VIOS, as well as enhancements to its remote data replication function that should reduce network latency. Storage Director was designed for fault-tolerant, high availability computing environments like IBM i, but its capabilities to work in heterogeneous datacenters make it particularly useful. In addition to IBM i, it works in Windows, Unix, Linux, z/OS, NonStop, and OpenVMS environments. Among the benefits of Storage Director touted by Tributary are automated backup and

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• Crossroads Adds More Automation to SPHiNX VTL

  May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Crossroads Systems unveiled a new release of its SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) device at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. With SPHiNX version 8.3, Crossroads is giving users the capability to automatically trigger other events upon completion of an activity in the VTL. Few processes stand by themselves in today’s IT environment, and backup is not one of them. When a database is successfully backed up, IT administrators often need to accomplish other tasks, such as replicating data to another server, applying encryption, activating post-process compression or de-duplication, or writing to tape. With the upcoming release of SPHiNX version

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