2012 - Page 51 of 88

Three IBM i Advocates Elevated to Champion Status

May 21, 2012 Dan Burger

Jim Buck, Aaron Bartell, and Scott Klement have been added to the IBM Champions for Power System club in recognition of their efforts to help build awareness of the IBM i platform and RPG. The selections were made by IBM and were based on contributions to and impact on the Power Systems community.

Buck, Bartell, and Klement are standout performers in the IBM i community. They are well-known advocates for the IBM i platform and they are joining the seven who were named champions last fall–Trevor Perry, Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Pete Massiello, David Gibbs, Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, and Brian May.

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Big Blue Boosts Trade-Ins For Power 770 Deal

May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Boy, IBM sure seems hot to move its almost-top-end Power 770 servers these days. The company has two deals in the works, and it last week jacked up the trade-in credits on one deal while it at the same time backed off a little bit on the sweetener for another deal that went dormant at the end of March but which was revived two weeks ago.

IBM has been offering trade-in credits to customers who move from older Power-based servers or competitive Unix or proprietary machines made by Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Fujitsu to new Power7-based machines for so

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Maxava Sees Big Bump In HA Sales To New Customers–Again

May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software maker Maxava says that more and more IBM i shops are getting savvy about protecting their critical application and data assets, and this is boosting the company’s sales as well as sales of new Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system. This is good for the IBM i ecosystem and is a reflection of the fact that high availability cluster has always been one of the dominant drivers of server sales in the IBM midrange.

Maxava says that new customer business–as opposed to maintenance and licensing from its existing customer base–was up 30 percent in

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As I See It: A House of Many Windows

May 21, 2012 Victor Rozek

A friend of mine was having relationship troubles. His girlfriend complained that he seemed incapable of going “deeper,” meaning he was resistant to the level of commitment she craved–a lament many women will no doubt recognize. From his perspective, he didn’t want heavy commitment, he wanted light companionship. He had a variety of interests, enjoyed doing a great many things, and wanted someone to share them with. Of course, one of his interests was sex, and therein, if you’ll pardon the expression, lies the rub. Essentially, he wanted a woman in his life, but not in his house. And things

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State Of IBM i Security Remains Poor, PowerTech Says

May 21, 2012 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops are still failing to enact basic security safeguards to prevent unauthorized access of the data in their systems, according to PowerTech, which issued its annual State of IBM i Security report this month. Even when it comes to basic security concepts, like changing default passwords, minimizing user permissions, and monitoring exit points, the average IBM i shop fails spectacularly. The upshot is that most shops are gambling with their data, with a heavy bet placed on “security through obscurity.”

If it was a video conference, PowerTech director of security technologies Robin Tatam would have been seen

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IBM i 7.1 TR4 Database Enhancements: What’s Going On?

May 21, 2012 Dan Burger

Even if you are not onboard with database modernization, IBM is moving forward and expecting that sooner or later the majority of the IBM i customer base will fathom the SQL/DDL emphasis that goes into DB2 for i. With the Technology Refresh 4 update that has just come warm out of the oven, the database enhancements that baked into TR4 include a little bit for everyone. That is, everyone who no longer hangs on to the traditional DB2/400 way of doing things.

Traditions are nice for holidays and family reunions. And they can sometimes serve you well in the IT

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IBM i And AIX Shops Pay A Hefty Premium Over PowerLinux Buyers

May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As anyone who has a past experience with multiple long-term relationships or more than one child will tell you, comparisons are odious. But when we are shopping for infrastructure or searching for a mate or figuring out which kid is going to get what when you finally shuffle off the mortal coil, you can’t help but make comparisons. And even after you’ve made your choice, you keep looking to make sure you are getting a good deal. If you are a Power Systems shop running either IBM i or AIX, you are just not getting as good of a deal

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Preventing Your System from Restarting After a Full System Backup

May 16, 2012 Hey, Joe

Good article on the secrets of the IBM i IPL parameters. Is there a way to stop the system from restarting after my full system backups complete (GO SAVE, option 21)? There are times that it would be great for the system to stay in restricted state after a backup, but the startup CL program always runs. How do I stop it from running?

–Doug

Here’s the drill for changing your System i and Power i partitions so that they don’t kick off their system startup programs after a GO SAVE, option 21, full system backup.

First, realize that

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Generic Processing, Continued

May 16, 2012 Ted Holt

Imagine needing to delete a large number–50, 100, 1,000–device descriptions, all of which begin with the same group of characters, from your system. Now imagine the Delete Device Description (DLTDEVD) command not accepting a generic device name. That got ugly quickly, didn’t it? And yet that sort of thing is what programmers often force end users to do. Maybe we need to add generic processing to our applications.

I have written about generic names before. (See Related Stories at the end of this article.) But I have not written about using generic values in the context of application development.

Suppose

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Boolean Variables: Underused and Unappreciated

May 16, 2012 Ted Holt

Boolean variables can have only two values: true and false. In CL, they are known as logical variables. In RPG, they’re called indicator variables. They’re not essential; I got by without them for years. But they are useful. Let’s take a closer look at Boolean variables.

Let me share a story with you. Some years ago, a certain factory started faxing requirements reports to their suppliers. The suppliers liked the reports, but some of them asked if they might receive the requirements electronically in a spreadsheet format. The IT department added a one-digit code to the database.

1=send by

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