• The AS/400 Operations Evolution

  August 26, 2019 Tom Huntington

  (Sponsored Content) According to a 2018 ITIC survey, 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the number one cause of unplanned downtime. In that story, the president of an IT operations and cybersecurity company observed that “the root causes of downtime are the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But there are more of them.”

  That got us thinking. Businesses and technologies have changed over the past few decades, but why haven’t our IT processes kept pace? Why are we still suffering from downtime as the result of human error? Sure, human …

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• IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

  Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …

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• IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.

  Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …

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• Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

  Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, …

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• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

  You might not remember it, but BMC Software still actively supports the IBM i environment with enterprise job scheduler, called CONTROL-M. The Houston, Texas, company has supported the IBM midrange server for years, and continues to do so with the 19th version of CONTROL-M, which the …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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• Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes

  March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• HelpSystems Gets Into JAMS for Scheduling

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems yesterday announced the acquisition of MVP Systems Software, the Connecticut-based developer of the JAMS workload management and scheduling software. While JAMS supported IBM i, HelpSystems will count on the product to deliver capabilities primarily in the open systems realm, with cloud possibilities looming in the future.

  The acquisition came together as the result of mutual respect that HelpSystems and MVP Systems Software had for each other, says Kate Bolseth, general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems.

  “We’ve known each other for years in the workload automation space and I’d say that we’ve both been very impressed with one …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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