• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

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• Fresche Buys Abacus To Integrate From IBM i To Cloud To Code

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest provider of application development and modernization tools for the IBM i platform and its predecessors, acquired Abacus Solutions, a long-time provider of cloud and managed services for the same market, giving a new meaning to the word integration in the IBM i brand. Now, with the combination of Fresche and Abacus, we can add an adverb to the intransitive form of the verb: vertically integrated.

  Vertical integration is all the rage these days, at least among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that consume half of the IT gear in the world and …

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• For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

  Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …

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• New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), Microsoft is best known for its full-featured Visual Studio offering. But many developers have grown attached to its younger, free-er, and lighter weight cousin, Visual Studio Code (VS Code). And with the new VS Code for IBM i extension recently unveiled by Liam Allan, the skinny IDE’s integration with the midrange server is getting better.

  VS Code for IBM i is an open source extension that allows developers to work with IBM i languages like RPG, COBOL, and CL within VS Code. Allan first released the product in February, but largely kept …

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• Historical, Functional, And Relevant

  July 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The purpose of The Four Hundred, which entered its 33^rd year of publication this week, is to support the community of companies and their IT staffs – and ultimately the end users and the success of those companies – who have deployed their mission critical applications on System/38, System/36, AS/400, AS/400e, iSeries, System i, and now IBM i platforms for a decade longer than we have been around. My mentor, Hesh Wiener, and various colleagues who worked for other publications that covered the System/38 and System/36 from the time before I came onto the scene in July 1989, …

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• Guardicore Extends Zero-Trust Security to IBM i

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Guardicore, which is trying to shake up the firewall market with its “micro segmentation” security solution, recently announced that it has extended its “zero-trust” approach to the IBM i platform. The offering will help IBM i shops close blind spots in their security posture by monitoring the server for signs of problems, the company says.

  Guardicore develops a software-based security solution called Centra that uses a micro segmentation approach to protecting IT assets from evolving security threats. Micro segmentation is a relatively new approach to cybersecurity that revolves around the concept of breaking the network down into multiple segments or …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus

  March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to a new series in The Four Hundred called In The IBM i Trenches.

  We spend a lot of time talking to people at IBM and at the key suppliers of systems software, application software, and development tools for the IBM i platform. But the ecosystem is a lot bigger than these players. There are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, depending. There are suppliers of third party maintenance as well as technical support and all kinds of programming and system management services. And there are an increasing number of hosting …

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• Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.

  The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …

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• Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For what is supposed to be a proprietary platform, the IBM i server sure has a lot of open source software running on it. In recent months, it appears that the majority of new programs introduced to IBM i are open source in nature. That pattern shows no signs of changing any time soon, according to a recent report by OpenLogic.

  Open software has existed on the IBM i platform for many years. The first highly publicized dip into the open source well occurred in 2005, when IBM partnered with a company called Zend to bring its PHP runtime to …

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• LaserVault Gears Up for ProtecTIER Migrations

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  ProtecTIER customers that are on the hunt for a new VTL system following IBM’s decision to end support for the product have a number of options available to them. For IBM i shops that are concerned about the speed of their backups, they may want to check out the ViTL offering from LaserVault, a longtime IBM i solution provider.

  Speed is one of the big benefits that ViTL brings to the IBM i backup arena, says Rick Wilson, the vice president of sales and solutions for LaserVault, which is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  “We’re not restricted by the size …

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