• Despite IBM Power Surge, MPG Keeps Performance Tool Relevant

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Midrange Performance Group have a well-deserved reputation in the IBM i community as performance experts. When it comes to capacity planning exercises and sizing new boxes, its Performance Navigator product is considered top-notch. But how does the company keep PerfNav relevant when the majority of IBM i customers’ workloads can comfortably fit on a relatively small machine? Here, it’s the little things that count. The huge amount of raw performance that IBM delivered with the Power7 servers (and is continuing to deliver with early Power8 servers) is a double-edge sword for the community as a whole. On

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• iBelieve Tour Returns to Europe

  October 21, 2014 Dan Burger

  IBM midrange shops in Europe, be on the lookout–the iBelieve road show, an enthusiastic exercise in IBM i advocacy and “i can do” spirit, is making the rounds. You can count on it making some noise, too. iBelieve events are one-day participatory theater combining education and entertainment. Retired IBM chief scientist Frank Soltis leads the group of iBelieve speakers that includes IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will, Product Offering Manager Alison Butterill, IBM i advocate extraordinaire Trevor Perry, Maxava‘s Matthew Ashton and Paul Hodgkinson of looksoftware. (For entertainment, you’ll get great stories from Soltis and you might get

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• Connections 5 CR1 Brings Yet More Features

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Two weeks ago, we told you about Connections 5, the new IBM i-supported release of the business-oriented social media tool from IBM. Just as version 5 was going out the door, IBM announced Connections 5.0 CR1, which brings yet more features. Connections is a social media tool designed for team collaboration. The software functions similar to Facebook and other social media websites by allowing users to follow and track people and entities, as well as discover new people and entities through the use of hashtags. It also hooks into Lotus email, contacts, calendar capabilities, and software; integrates with IBM’s

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• IBM i Gets New MQ Security Options

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i versions 7.1. and 7.2 brought lots of good stuff in the Web integration department, including support for REST Web services and Node.js. But IBM‘s IBM i updates also brought good old fashioned message queue-based integration with support for the latest release of IBM’s IBM MQ. The version 8 release of IBM MQ–the new name for the product that formerly went by MQSeries and WebSphereMQ–was unveiled back in April. But as part of its early October announcements, IBM also announced that IBM i 7.1 TR9 and 7.2 TR1 support IBM MQ for Multiplatforms

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• HTTP Server for i Gets Isolation Chambers

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Running big Web workloads on the IBM i server is about to get easier, thanks to changes IBM made to the HTTP Server for i with the latest Technology Refreshes. IBM has done a great job with its HTTP Server for i, the one powered by Apache. It’s powerful, standardized, and integrated directly into IBM i, giving users the best of both worlds. And with application modernization on the upswing, it’s no surprise that the HTTP Server is getting a good workout at shops around the world. But with all that use comes a cost, particularly when hundreds

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• ARCAD’s Free-Format Conversion Tool Passes Real World Test

  October 21, 2014 Dan Burger

  The conversion of fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG has created a great deal of interest in the IBM i community since support was added in Technology Refresh 7 of IBM i 7.1 late in 2013. Barbara Morris, a member of the RPG compiler development team at IBM‘s Toronto lab has been the IBM spokesperson on the topic, drawing crowds to technical sessions online and at local user groups and technical conferences. One of the benefits free-format RPG offers is that it modernizes RPG to the extent that it is understandable to programmers familiar with Java and .NET, but who

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• IBM Pushes Tape’s Envelope with TS1150 Drive

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  On Friday IBM will begin deliveries of the TS1150, the fifth generation of the IBM 3592 enterprise tape drive. The new high-end drive will move data at rates up to 360 MB per second and support cartridges that store up to 10 TB of uncompressed data. And later this fall, the TS1150 will also borrow a neat trick from its LTO sibling. The 3592 enterprise tape drive is IBM’s high-end drive for the biggest, most demanding clients who need tape environments with the highest capacity, highest speed, and lowest error-rates. The tradeoff for choosing the 3592 series over the Linear

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• Protecting IBM i from the Wild Wild Web

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web more than 20 years ago, he couldn’t have known it would turn into the Wild Wild West, a place where people are forced to take pains to protect themselves from malicious marauders, lest they lose precious data and money. Today’s cybercriminals are experts at taking advantage of weakness, including using malware to exploit vulnerabilities in corporate IT systems, including IBM i. While IBM i’s attack surface is smaller than other platform’s, its proximity to less well-designed systems (coughWindowscough) make it more vulnerable than it would otherwise be. No

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• Cybernetics Banks on IBM i Storage Expertise

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have many options when it comes to selecting a virtual tape library (VTL) provider, including a software-based solution that runs on the Power Systems server itself. While you may not be familiar with the name Cybernetics, the storage device manufacturer is quite familiar with the IBM i line of servers, and has provided VTLs, SANs, and tape backup solutions to many IBM i clients over the past 25 years. Privately held Cybernetics has been designing and selling storage solutions since it was founded in 1978. Today the Yorktown, Virginia-based company sells everything from high-end SANs equipped

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• Shield Shoots the Gap Between HA and Vaulting with LVLT4i

  October 21, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is gearing up to launch Library Vault for IBM i, a new data vaulting solution aimed at larger IBM i shops and managed service providers. LVLT4i uses an interesting mix of remote journaling, object replication, and independent auxiliary storage pool (IASP) technologies, which Shield says provide the data protection of a full high availability solution but without the cost and complexity. LVLT4i is a hybrid product that borrows the data and object replication capabilities from HA4i, the company’s remote journaling-based high availability software. Because remote journaling only protects database files, Shield built its own object replication process

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