• Feeling Like A Heel

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Correlation is not causation. That’s one of the first things you learn as an engineer or scientist. But as human beings that are genetically predisposed to find connections between disparate phenomenon, we just can’t help ourselves. We are, in the final analysis, pattern recognition machines that are wired for small tribes and that have a tendency toward gluttony with fatty, sweet, or salty foods. (Which is why Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s should be outlawed, right after I finish this here pint.) We may be designed to live in small tribes and do hunting and gathering, knowing

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• Putting Your i System in Semi-Restricted State

  November 16, 2011 Hey, Joe

  We need to put one of our i partitions in restricted state where no applications are running. However, we also need TCP/IP to be up while the system is down, so that we can download PTFs and some software upgrades while our third-party packages aren’t in use. Is there a way to put our system in a semi-restricted state where we can only use our system console and TCP/IP communications? –Mike Yes, there is. And it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Here’s the drill. First, make sure all your users are off the system. Then, make sure that all your batch

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• Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names!

  November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

  Sometimes I find out that something useful has been available to me for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. Then I feel like a moron. Today I’m telling you that a certain DB2 for i feature has been around for decades, and you’re probably not using it. However, there’s no need to feel like a moron. The feature of which I speak is the database ALIAS. As you well know, DB2 for i, in its native architecture, permits database column (field) names of up to 10 characters. That’s certainly better than the six-character limit for identifiers in

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• NULL and NOT IN

  November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

  No matter who you are, there’s always something you can learn. In Much Ado about Nothing: Interesting Facts about Null, I presented a good bit of information about null values in database tables. Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble upon something I did not know about nulls. It started innocently enough. I was surfing the Web and happened upon a link to an article entitled Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes. I couldn’t click the link fast enough. I found a very well-written article by Plamen Ratchev. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but Ratchev wrote about

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• Linoma: DMZ Gateway Tightens File Transfer Security

  November 15, 2011 Dan Burger

  File sharing among business partners is a common practice. Unfortunately, being careless about it is also a common practice. Security is often imagined to be better than it really is and sometimes not thought of at all. Even companies that are paying attention to this topic–perhaps because it is mandated by one of the regulatory compliance laws–may not have discovered the best practices for secure transfers. Linoma Software recently released a white paper report on the topic of DMZ gateways that provides solid advice on file transfer security. The DMZ (demilitarized zone), also known as a perimeter network, is found

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• Lawson Software Smoothes Employee Exits

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Getting new employees registered and situated with IT systems is critical, but perhaps just as important is the process of offboarding employees who are leaving the organization because they quit, were fired, or were laid off. Lawson Software, which is now an affiliate of Infor, last month unveiled Enwisen Offboarding, a new cloud-based solution that automates administrative tasks associated with the departures of employees. Lawson acquired Enwisen for $70 million late last year, just before Infor swooped in with an acquisition offer ($1.83 billion) that Lawson couldn’t refuse. The deal brought Lawson Enwisen’s cloud-based human resources suite,

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• IBS Opens Product Roadmap to Customers

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBS last week unveiled a new initiative called the Enterprise Vertical Leadership Program (EVLP) that’s aimed at giving customers more say in the development of the company’s enterprise software, as well as creating standard versions of the software for major vertical markets. IBS, which develops ERP software for IBM i and Windows servers, is remaking itself in the wake of being bought by Symphony Technology Group in June for $35 million. The Swedish software company’s strength is distribution-focused ERP software for midmarket customers, and its new EVLP initiative will seek to make the most of that. Each customer admitted to

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• Food Distributor Taps DSC for IBM i HA Service

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Hispanic food distributor Diaz Foods is protecting the uptime of its IBM i-based applications through SafeData HA, a high availability hosting solution offered by Data Storage Corp. Diaz Foods began 21 years ago as a Hispanic food distributor serving a chain of five Diaz Foods stores in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Over the years, the distribution company has expanded its coverage, and today Diaz Foods imports and distributes approximately 6,000 different products to 5,000 customers in 25 eastern states and Sweden. In support of Diaz Foods’ business is a fleet of semi trucks, a quarter of a million square

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• Crossroads to Debut StrongBox, an LTFS-Based Archive

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Crossroads Systems next month will begin selling StrongBox, a new storage solution that combines the large capacities and long-term storage capabilities of tape with the quick accessibility of disk. The solution, which is built on the linear tape file system (LTFS) technology that debuted with LTO 5, doesn’t support native IBM i data, but could still make it into the data centers of IBM i shops. LTFS was one of the pleasant surprises that debuted over a year ago when the LTO Consortium released the specs for the fifth generation of the Linear Tape-Open format. LTFS is a self-describing tape

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• Best Buy to Acquire IBM i Cloud Provider mindSHIFT

  November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Electronics retailer Best Buy is about to get into the IBM i cloud business. Last week the $50 billion company announced its intent to buy mindSHIFT Technologies, a Massachusetts-based managed service provider (MSP) that has hosted IBM i servers for several years, and launched a public IBM i cloud offering in 2010. The $167 million deal would give Best Buy entry into the burgeoning MSP market for small and midsize companies–and give the Geek Squad some green-screen cred. mindSHIFT Technologies provides cloud services, data center services, and professional services to more than 5,400 clients and 25,000 desktops in the

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