• Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

  HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …

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• There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …

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• SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

  January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

  Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …

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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

  That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …

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• Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.

  Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …

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• Db2 For IBM i 7.3 Hits A Bad Patch

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know, we are among the people in the IBM i community who are always telling you to keep current on your PTF patches for the best operating system available on Power Systems. (No, we are not talking about AIX or Linux.) But every now and again, as happens with all operating systems, something gets fixed and the fix is worse than the problem it was solving.

  That has apparently happened with the database patches for the Db2 for i relational database management system embedded in the IBM i 7.3 release once the Db2 Group patches from November 13 …

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• Converge Technology Emerges As Reseller Powerhouse

  December 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Here’s a computer company you may not have heard about: Converge Technology Solutions. Over the past two years, the publicly traded Toronto, Canada-based company has completed numerous acquisitions of value added resellers (VARs) and private cloud providers that ply the IBM Power Systems waters – including Key Information Systems, Corus360, and Essex Technology Group, to name a few – and there’s no reason to think it will stop in 2020.

  Converge Technology Solutions was founded in 2017, when it began executing its goal to acquire a number of smaller VARs and consolidate the “fragmented” reseller landscape, according to chief executive …

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• Power S812 Gets Another Reprieve, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For whatever reason, Big Blue did not create a cut-down version of the Power9 entry server aimed at the smallest of the small businesses that run themselves on the IBM i platform. Meaning there was no Power S912 or Power S912 Mini replacement for the Power S812 and its specially priced Power S812 Mini. (The former is based on the Power9 chip, while the latter is based on the older Power8 chip, which has a lot less oomph per core.)

  Back in March, IBM extended the life of the Power S812 and its Mini variant until November 29 of this …

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• IBM i Marketing: Not A Thankless Job

  November 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For over one decade of the three that I called New York City my home, I was the president of the board of directors in the co-operative apartment building in which I lived. For many years, I ran a half rack of servers and storage in the kitchenette in our apartment to support IT Jungle’s website and subscription database, and I ran T1 lines up the outside of the building and in through the window. It was unconventional running a business that way, but there was no cloud computing as we know it, and certainly not at the prices you …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Red Hat Linux

  November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support.

  Just as a recap from last week’s …

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