• As I See It: Cloud Cover

  May 14, 2012 Victor Rozek

  Herb Grosch was the second scientist ever hired by IBM. And he was a good hire. His resume resembled an achievement highlight reel. It included doing calculations for the Manhattan Project, and helping develop the Whirlwind computer at MIT–the first system that actually operated in real time and used video displays for output. He was also the first to formalize the relationship between cost and performance in what has become known as Grosch’s Law: “economy is as the square root of the speed.” But perhaps his most fascinating insight dates back to the 1950s–more than a half-century ago–when he

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• IBM Revives Power 770 Discount Deal For Spring Push

  May 14, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in March, when IBM was hot to sell some of its fairly large Power 770 servers to close out a good first quarter, the company whipped out a quick rebate scheme for the processing capacity on the machines that I dubbed March Madness. It is not clear how effective this deal was, but it has come and gone and now IBM has a similar rebate to push some more Power 770 iron here in the second quarter. The original March Madness deal in announcement letter 312-038 gave the same discounts on two generations of Power 770 machines with

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• New RPG Open Access Standard Depends On XML

  May 14, 2012 Dan Burger

  A group of RPG heavyweights, including IBM, have come together in support of the first standard pertaining to RPG Open Access. But to understand RPG Open Access, start with the importance of RPG interfacing with other technologies. That’s not all that common. RPG has a reputation for its proprietary chains. Mistakenly this stops with the topic of green screens and graphical user interfaces. In reality, it is about the separation of the user interface from the business logic. This newly created standard, which was announced May 8, attempts to get below the surface. It is targeted at extending the

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• COMMON Finds Its Happy Spot With IBM i And Disneyland

  May 14, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i world descended upon the Happiest Place on Earth last week for the COMMON 2012 User Conference and Expo. Aside from a major malfunction in Disneyland’s IT system that saw the point of sale system go down across the entire property for multiple days, the show went off without a hitch. An estimated 700 paying attendees found themselves comfortably ensconced in IBM i education, 75 software vendors were content with attendees’ interest in their wares, and IBM eagerly showed off the awesomeness of its new PureSystems gear. The four-day IBM i extravaganza kicked off with the opening session

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• Admin Alert: Prepping For And Responding To An Unheard Of IBM i #FAIL

  May 9, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  In the past six months, I’ve had three occasions where two of the six IBM i partitions I manage have needed emergency IPLs to restart their systems. This is unusual for an IBM i installation and it got me thinking what could have been done to avoid the issue and how I could have reacted better after the issue occurred. This article summarizes what I’ve learned from these experiences. This Ain’t Windows, You Know These emergency situations occurred on a Power 720 i 6.1 partition (one emergency) and a Power 6 550 partition (two emergencies). While it’s not as unusual

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• The Proper Way To Deallocate A Pointer

  May 9, 2012 Ted Holt

  Jerry Clower used to tell a story about attending a rattlesnake roundup. He said that people from the humane society were on hand to be sure that the rattlesnakes were killed properly. Mr. Clower remarked that he didn’t know that there was an improper way to kill a rattlesnake. Pointers can be like rattlesnakes, biting you when you don’t expect it. Do you know the proper way to kill a pointer? Use the %ALLOC function to allocate memory to a program. The system copies the address of the memory into a pointer variable. D SomePointer s D SomeData s 256a

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• OLAP Is Simple, Once You Understand It

  May 9, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I have a problem that I solved with a simple RPG program, but I know it can be done with SQL as well. I needed to generate a simple table of employee ID, name, and average of the last five weeks paychecks. Is this simple or complicated to do with SQL? –Barry You are correct that SQL can do the calculation, Barry. However, you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s simple or complicated. First, let’s get some data to work with. I’m going to simplify your question slightly by using a name only, without an ID, to identify an

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• Safestone Updates Cross-Platform Compliance Tool

  May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Safestone Technologies recently added support for Linux with its Compliance Center for IBM Power Systems. The audit and compliance reporting tool now works across all three Power Systems operating systems: IBM i, AIX, and Linux. Safestone originally launched its Compliance Center software for IBM i back in 2010. The software takes the grunt work out of sifting through server logs and configuration settings, gathering the pertinent data, stripping out the unimportant stuff, and arranging it into an acceptable report format to hand to your auditor to prove compliance with a range of industry regulations. The U.K. security software company followed

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• FalconStor Adds Inline Dedupe to VTL

  May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that back up their data using FalconStor Software‘s virtual tape library (VTL) can now deduplicate their data as the backup is executing, thanks to newly introduced support for inline deduplication with FalconStor VTL 7.5. FalconStor VTL is a backup and recovery solution that it sells either as a pre-configured appliance (or a cluster of appliances), or as software that customers install on their own X86 servers. By backing up to disk instead of tape, the VTL offering helps speed its customers’ backups and also provides more flexibility. The product supports the Power Systems server and IBM i environments,

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• JReport 11 Brings New Dashboard, Mobile Options

  May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Jinfonet Software last month unveiled JReport 11, the newest version of its Java-based reporting software, which can run on the IBM i server. Version 11 introduces new data visualization capabilities, new dashboard options, and the capability to view reports on iOS devices. JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that, up to this point, included three core modules, including a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, and an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module. The software runs on any Java-based Web application server, and is typically utilized as an embedded reporting tool for other Web applications.

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