• Guru: Speeding Up RPG By Reducing I/O Operations, Part 2

  June 12, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Legacy code. Often one admits they have legacy code either with a chuckle or a wince. Nonetheless, it usually is admitted with bad connotations. We must remember though – legacy code becomes legacy code because it works. It performs its tasks day in and day out for many years and is forgotten about. Only the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

  The problem with this code is that, while it works, decades slip by, and technology evolves. As these decades roll along, we don’t just end up with a few programs that fit this ‘legacy code’ stereotype, we often end …

  Read more

• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

  Read more

• Guru: Speeding Up RPG By Reducing I/O Operations, Part 1

  May 8, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Perhaps one of the easiest ways to speed up an RPG program is to reduce the number of I/O operations it needs to perform. In this article let’s explore one simple method for moving toward dataset processing.

  Here I have a simple RPG program. Okay, admittedly, we don’t often get to write “simple” RPG programs, but for this example, I have stripped the RPG program down to just the read loop so I can demonstrate the conversion.

  1     Dcl-f AcctMstr Usage(*Input) Keyed;
  2     Dcl-pr entry ExtPgm('RPGRPT1');
  3       n Packed(3:0);
  4     End-Pr;
  
  5     Dcl-pi entry;
  6       inBranch Packed(3:0);
  7     End-pi;
  
  8     

  …

  Read more

• Guru: Aliases — Underused and Unappreciated

  October 3, 2022 Ted Holt

  One of the first things I learned about programming in the RPG II language was that field and variable names had to be six characters or less and they did not have to be pronounceable. I accepted this without question, as I was new to computers and figured that everything that had to do with computers was arcane and other-worldly. It wasn’t until I began work toward my computer science degree and was privileged to learn Pascal that I came to appreciate the value of longer identifier names, and of clarity of source code in general.

  You don’t have to …

  Read more

• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

  Read more

• LUG Looks to Grow Membership

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you work at a large IBM i shop and are interested in having more of a say in the direction of the platform, then you might be interested in joining the influential Large User Group (LUG). And as luck would have it, the group, which is meeting in Rochester next week for the first time in three years, has several openings in its rolls and is looking for new members.

  LUG got its start back in 1994, when IT executives from six big AS/400 shops got together at a COMMON conference and realized they had a common set of …

  Read more

• IBM Revs FlashSystem Line, Adds Cyber Vault

  February 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week debuted new members of its family of NVM-Express all-flash storage arrays, including the FlashSystem 7300 and FlashSystem 9500 arrays. It also launched a new release of the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and rolled out the Cyber Vault to thwart ransomware.

  The FlashSystem 7300 replaces FlashSystem 7200 in the all-flash hierarchy of IBM systems, delivering a 25 percent performance boost. According to IBM’s hardware announcement, each 2U device will feature two node canisters, each with two 10-core Intel Cascade Lake processors and 128 GB of cache standard (with options ranging up to 1.5 TB). The array has …

  Read more

• Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

  Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …

  Read more

• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

  Read more

• Sibley Highlights Power10’s Security and AI Capabilities

  October 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the vice president and global offering management for Cognitive Systems at IBM, Steve Sibley often gets the honor of delivering the keynote address at the annual POWERUp conference. During his keynote at last week’s show, Sibley used the time to delve into the latest Power10 processor and its extensive list of new features, including some designed specifically to boost AI and security.

  “One of the real privileges I have as project manager for Power Systems to be able to take the key innovations our team is developing in Rochester and our different development labs around the world, and bring …

  Read more

Previous Articles