Dan Burger
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High Availability Calms Distributor’s Fears
November 2, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreBehind this distribution company that spans Europe and the United States is an IBM Power8 system running IBM i. The production box is a single-socket, six-core, 3.02 GHz processor configuration capable of 59,500 CPW, but able to get the job done while operating on two cores. It sits in the home offices of LF SpA headquartered in Cesena, Italy, about a four-hour drive north of Rome. The company takes its business continuity very seriously, which is why it recently implemented high availability software from Maxava.
Maxava has been in the high availability and disaster recovery business for 15-plus years.
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First Open Source Conference For IBM i Shops Planned
November 2, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too.
Getting a grip on a project without the financial investment of buying software and signing service contracts appeals to some shops that prefer to keep their business an internal affair. And there
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Academic Initiative Lives Up To Its Name
October 26, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe day will come. You’ll be better off if you start preparing now. Skills replacement is something you have to plan for. Reacting to skills lost through retirement or other avenues is a too little, too late scenario. You build a skills pipeline by bringing people into your organization and you move them along through the company. Aiding that effort is the IBM Power System Academic Initiative, which has been making some notable progress lately.
Just a little more than a week ago, the Academic Initiative (AI) began promoting its new RPG course curriculum, a long overdue effort to
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PowerTech Adds Centralized Management for Exit Points Security
October 21, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreInsufficient data is the cause of all sorts of bad stuff. It could be the reason that two-thirds of IBM i shops have no network exit point programs in place. It’s not that information on exit point security doesn’t exist at tens of thousands of IBM midrange shops. But it is a lack of awareness that results in serious security weaknesses. With no steps taken to secure exit points, popular protocols like FTP and ODBC are potentially exposed.
PowerTech, the IBM i security software vendor under the HelpSystems umbrella, advises that monitoring the exit points is critical because the
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A Different View Of IBM i And PASE
October 19, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read morePASE is the AIX runtime environment that is integrated into the IBM i operating system. Most IBM i community members know of it. Comparatively few actually know it. It’s not a wild guess to say most IBM midrange shops that use the TCP/IP networking stack, the Java virtual machine, the Apache Web server, or the PHP runtime are unaware that these were crafted for AIX and are running inside of PASE. There’s reason to believe that PASE awareness may be on the rise. What’s that mean, if anything, to you?
PASE brings added functionality to the IBM i OS by
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Tiered Storage Upgrade Boosts BRMS
October 19, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreIBM Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) found a front row seat during the IBM i Technology Refresh announcements this month because of its new tiered storage capabilities. IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will made note of it in his most recent You and i blog, which featured Will’s picks for top news items among the early October IBM announcements. That tells me IBM i customers have been delivering a message or two about what BRMS needed.
From Will’s blog: “Until recently, there was a rather simple ‘tiered storage’ capability in BRMS that would detect how frequently a library was
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RPG, XML, SOAP, and REST: Web Services for IBM i
October 14, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAnyone following the evolution of Web services has seen the RESTful architecture gaining ground quickly on the traditional favorite SOAP architecture. Web development and particularly Web-based mobile development has welcomed REST. To keep up with demand, Krengel Technology has introduced version 3.2 of its RPG-XML Suite, which delivers new Web service capabilities to IBM i customers.
Krengel developed the RPG-XML Suite for RPG developers who, as the Krengel website notes, “have lived through creating Web services in RPG and Java without a well-packaged development toolset.”
Web service basics: An RPG program calls a Web service that resides on another machine.
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IBM i Tech Refresh Reiterates Database Emphasis
October 12, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhether or not the majority of IBM i shops have an interest in SQL, IBM continues to make database enhancements its top priority as it rolls out new Technology Refreshes for its eponymous Power Systems operating system. The fact that Big Blue makes the DB2 for i database a priority is an indicator of its importance at the heart of the system. The i 7.1 TR11 and i 7.2 TR3 enhancements keep the database heart beating strong.
Ever since the TR program launched with the release of IBM i 7.1 TR1 in September 2010, we’ve seen database enhancements take the
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BCD And Zend Aim For Expanded PHP Development
October 12, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read morePHP brings multi-platform capabilities, but for many IT Jungle readers it’s all about the IBM i and the RPG green-screen applications that are being lined up and converted to browser-based apps using open source PHP. The popularity of PHP in the IBM midrange community continues to grow. It’s undeniably the most successful open source story in the community. Along with that is the partnership between Zend Technologies and BCD Software. It continues to grow as well.
BCD and Zend last week announced a stronger bond in their business relationship, which has been in place for three years. For BCD,
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IBM i Tech Refreshes Bring New Features to Explore
October 7, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM software engineers have prepared another batch of IBM i-centric accomplishments that will be rolled out next month as IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh (TR) 11 and IBM i 7.2 TR 3. Application development, systems management, and database upgrades are all lined up at the innovation dispenser and this is what is being dished out. Companies with the mind to modernize their RPG development, incorporate some open source languages, and do more with the Apache Web server should pay attention.
Although it’s not part of the Technology Refresh, there are also upgrades to the IBM i Access Client Solutions