• IBM i Finds A Youthful Swagger Down In Texas

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform and ecosystem may not be what they once were. Thirty years of relentless OLTP processing will do that to you. But if COMMON’s POWERUp 18 conference this week in San Antonio is any indication, the box itself and the ecosystem it supports are far from dead.

  Signs of life in IBM i-land were evident everywhere at the Marriott Rivercenter, the hotel where about 1,000 IBM i professionals, vendors, and IBMers spent the past four days holed up for COMMON‘s annual conference, which was renamed POWERUp.

  Here are some of the highlights of the show, which …

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• Syncsort Talks Rebranding, IBM i Product Strategy

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Think you know Syncsort? Who the company is and what it does? Well, you might want to take a fresh peek, because the company that acquired Vision Solutions and a handful of other IBM i software firms is on the move. In fact, it used the COMMON POWERUp 18 conference in San Antonio this week to begin rolling out a long-awaited company rebranding and major product refresh – including its new Fusion unification strategy and several new IBM i products.

  First of all, the company will continue to be known as Syncsort. The executives leading the Pearl River, New …

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• Massiello Named First Lifetime Champion for Power

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Pete Massiello has been a mainstay of the IBM i community for decades. He’s the president of iTech Solutions, a former president at COMMON, a respected technical authority on the platform, an in-demand speaker, and part of the inaugural group of IBM Champions for Power Systems in 2011. Now he can add one more title to his resume: Lifetime Champion for Power Systems.

  IBM this month announced that Massiello is the first Lifetime Champion for Power, an event for which he was not prepared. “It was a surprise to me,” he said, before quickly adding “It’s a huge honor, an …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 23

  May 23, 2018 Dan Burger

  COMMON stole the spotlight this week with its POWERUp 18 event in Austin, Texas. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie was our boots on the ground at the show, giving us the inside scoop from the opening session and what appears to be a bright future for IBM i and the Power business. And we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the continued celebrations of the 30th anniversary of our beloved platform. If you haven’t been reading The Four Hundred this week, you have been missing out. After you catch up here, take a look below at what’s happening …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 20

  May 23, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Hello good people of IBM i Land. We are back in the Wednesday edition of The Four Hundred, our usual home, but during the summer the IBM i PTF Guide may end up at the tail end of the Monday edition of the newsletter depending on the vacation schedule for the Wednesday edition. The news tends to be light in the summer, as you all know, so we often consolidate to one publication a week.

  In any event, there is not much going on with IBM i and related systems software in terms of patches. This stands to reason …

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• Syncsort Acquires Townsend’s IBM i Encryption Software

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort has acquired the bulk of Townsend Security’s products in a bid to bolster its burgeoning suite of security software for IBM i. The big get for Syncsort (formerly Vision Solutions) is AES/400, Townsend’s well-respected database encryption software for the IBM i platform. Meanwhile, Townsend Security will continue developing and selling encryption key management software for open systems and cloud platforms.

  When it comes to database encryption on the IBM i server, there are few options. There are various encryption solutions available from IBM, including Cryptographic Services, which is the mainstream offering today. But when it comes to third-party …

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• Past And Future Collide At PowerUp 18

  May 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  COMMON kicked off its first inaugural PowerUp conference Sunday in San Antonio, Texas, where an estimated 1,000 attendees are gathered to learn about the Power Systems platform and share their knowledge with other users. The IBM i server’s 30 years of reliable service was a big topic of discussion, but IBM executives Steve Sibley and Stefanie Chiras were determined to talk about Power’s AI future.

  Any platform that lives to be 30 years old in this day and age is doing something right. While today’s IBM i server is not the same beast as the first AS/400 that came out …

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• Guru: How To Override Query Options

  May 21, 2018 Ted Holt

  QAQQINI is a physical file with which you can control certain behaviors of the DB2 for i query engine. For a list of the query options that you can change, visit the IBM Knowledge Center. Normally you don’t have to use it, as the engineers of IBM have done a great job designing an optimizer that does a great job.

  At times you may want to change a query attribute for a certain job. There is no need to build many QAQQINI files to handle all possibilities. Instead, you can temporarily override query attributes within a job. DB2 for …

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• Big Blue Gives IBM i Shops A Special 30th Birthday Bash Box

  May 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Big Blue is in the middle of celebrating three decades of the IBM i platform, and the company has unveiled a special birthday box that commemorates the occasion. It’s essentially a Solutions Edition package with some extra bells and whistles. For those unfamiliar with the Solutions Editions, they are pre-configured systems with a choice of IBM and ISV software discounts applied. Those discounts would be unavailable when buying the systems or the software individually.

  The IBM i 30th Edition offering is based on IBM i Solution Edition Power9 Model S914, a P05 tier box, with four cores. All of the …

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• Inside IBM’s SAP HANA On Power Playbook

  May 21, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line is in transition right now, making the jump from Power8 to Power9 processors, and yet the company wants to continue selling applications without having customers wait for the newer chip to be available across the entire Power Systems portfolio. This is a particular problem when it comes to the HANA in-memory database on Power Systems, which IBM is eager to sell given the higher memory capacity and bandwidth that Power9 offers compared to the Xeon processors from Intel.

  To help business partners that are peddling SAP suites on Power, which includes the IBM i platform, in …

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