• Mad Dog 21/21: Jumping The Shark

  January 16, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  IBM just finished a banner year. It recorded the highest revenue in its history and impressive profit. But if you depend on IBM’s proprietary systems, the IBM i and the System z platforms, don’t let the headlines fool you. You (and IBM) have a strategic problem. When it comes to computer hardware, IBM jumped the shark years ago. Jumped the shark? When Fonzie jumped the shark, five years into Happy Days, it marked a zenith, an irreversible turning point although the show lasted another five years. IBM jumped the shark in 1981, as it introduced the PC. In

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• IBM’s Move On Up To Power7 Upgrade Math

  January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are using an old PowerPC, Power4, Power5, or Power5+ system, you have no doubt long since paid for the machine. And I would even go so far as to guess that you have created your own applications to run on OS/400 or i5/OS–and perhaps even IBM i–on these old machines, or maybe you have some third-party apps that do what you tell them to and, more importantly, don’t do things you don’t tell them to do, like crash all the time. So with the economy not exactly exuding exuberance, rational or any other kind, you are probably feeling

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• AURA Launches Alternative PHP Server Stack for IBM i

  January 16, 2012 Alex Woodie

  AURA Equipments today launched iAMP Server, a free collection of software for running PHP workloads on the IBM i server. iAMP is composed of binaries for several products, including PHP, the standard Apache Web server, and the MySQL database. AURA says it developed iAMP, which runs primarily in the PASE AIX runtime, to provide IBM i shops with a standards-based alternative to Zend Technologies‘ PHP solutions for the platform. iAMP Server is a collection of mostly open source software that includes Apache’s HTTP server version 2.2.21, MySQL version 5.1.59, and PHP version 5.3.8. AURA’s proprietary Easycom software is also

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• Control Your Code, Control Your Costs And Destiny

  January 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After decades of reading this newsletter, you know a thing or two about me. One of them, which may not be immediately obvious, is that I can be something of a control freak. (Just saying that in a sentence is difficult, and I want to deny it. But there it is.) And guess what? So were AS/400 shops back in the day, and a fair argument could be made that they were better off, technically and economically, when they freaked out (in a good way) and controlled their application code. Maybe I have been around too long, but I am

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• CCSS Helps Detects Fraud with New Database Monitor

  January 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

  It’s a well established fact that the majority of fraud reported by companies is not perpetrated by hackers coming in over the Net, but is actually the work of employees and other insiders with access to internal systems. Combating this type of fraud requires a multi-pronged approach, including strong security configurations and powerful tools. The IBM i world just got another fraud-fighting tool last month when CCSS announced the availability of its new database monitoring solution. The new database monitoring capabilities were delivered as part of QMessage Monitor (QMM) version 7, a major new release of CCSS’ real-time message monitoring

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• Admin Alert: Is It a Performance Issue or a Throughput Issue?

  January 11, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  It’s common for Power i users to complain their batch jobs are running too slowly. But is system capability responsible for slow batch throughput or could the problem be caused by poor work management procedures? This week, let’s look at a few scenarios where users say their batch jobs are running too slowly and discuss what, if anything (short of a hardware upgrade), can help speed up batch processing. Getting To the Bottom of Slow Batch Processing Users who feel that their batch work isn’t completing in a timely manner may blame that perceived slowness on the system hardware. This

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• IBM i and Zip Files

  January 11, 2012 Ted Holt

  You may have heard of the new zip file APIs–QZipZip and QZipUnzip–that IBM added to IBM i 7.1. I am looking forward to using them. But if your shop is like mine, that is, you’re not running 7.1, there’s another way to work with zip files, and it does a good job. The other way is the Java Archive utility, or jar. It’s an easy command to use, and it runs under Qshell. Here’s how it works. The jar command has several parameters. First is a case-sensitive list of options. You will always need a lowercase “f” option. Second is

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• New in DB2 for i 7.1: Use Global Variables to Track Environment Settings

  January 11, 2012 Michael Sansoterra

  The concept of having a locally maintained application “scratch pad” to keep track of session specific information has been around for quite awhile. RPG applications have long used the LDA (Local Data Area) to track common information meant to be shared between programs within a job. (This saves developers the trouble of passing around all of this common information as parameters.) Likewise, many operating systems have the concept of an environment variable, which is similarly used to maintain and publish many OS-defined and user-defined values. Under IBM i 7.1, SQL offers something called a global variable, which can be

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• IBM Updates Software Inventory and Usage Tool

  January 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Confused about what kind of software you’re running, and exactly how you’re using it? A new release of IBM‘s Tivoli Asset Discovery for Distributed may help you get a handle on your software inventory and how you use it. Many software companies license their software in a myriad of ways. IBM, for example, offers several ways to license software, including sub-capacity licensing by LPAR or VMware virtual machines, and everybody’s all-time favorite, processor value unit (PVU)-based pricing. Enter Tivoli Asset Discovery for Distributed, a software application designed to help organizations maintain an up-to-date inventory of installed distributed software and

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• Infor Touts Growth, Makes an Acquisition

  January 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Although it’s not publicly owned, Infor shared some financial results with the public earlier this month. The software giant says revenue from software licenses grew 17 percent for the 12 months that ended in November. Infor also announced the acquisition of certain products from RSVP Business Systems that are designed to bolster the quality control systems of manufacturers. Infor shares are not traded on the stock market, but sometimes the company acts as though they are (and there continues to be speculation that sometime soon, they might). To that end, the company shared a small fraction of the numbers that

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