• Backup And Recovery Options Proliferate With New Storage Director

  December 5, 2016 Dan Burger

  You just escaped from a meeting on IT objectives and your backup strategy took a beating. Slow, inefficient, antiquated, completely lacking a recovery plan were just some of the stones that were thrown. So, what’s your next move? One option is virtual tape backup. If high speed, multiple server and multiple storage technology capabilities, and a redundant data recovery strategy sound good. Storage Director from Tributary Systems deserves investigation. Storage Director was recently updated to include policy-based tiering of data storage with capabilities to replicate data to a separate site or multiple sites–both on premise and off premise–that have object-storing

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• IBM Tweaks More Power Systems Peripherals

  November 30, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a bit of time to drill down into the annual Power Systems announcements from Big Blue, which in the case of this year happened across September and October. We have told you all about the new systems, such as they are, and updated IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 software releases, as well as various other components. In this week’s installment, we are going to drill down into some of the new peripheral cards that IBM is putting into the Power Systems iron. First up is a new cryptographic accelerator, called by the unwieldy name of the PCIe Cryptographic

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• Skills Shortage Prompts Fresche’s New View of X-Analysis

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Different companies have different ways of dealing with the emerging IBM i skills shortage. Some shops may look to college grads for fresh new faces, while others may seek to retrain existing IT personnel in IBM i skills. Still others will seek to exit IBM i through wholesale migration to X86 or cloud platforms. At Fresche, the skills shortage presents an opportunity to get a well-regarded code analysis tool called X-Analysis into the hands of more people. X-Analysis, you will remember, was Fresche Legacy’s first big purchase following its 2012 name-change from Speedware. Developed by the British software

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• VAI Teams With Forward Thinking For GPS Truck Tracking

  November 30, 2016 Dan Burger

  Midsize manufacturers and distributors have unique requirements when it comes to delivering their products to market. Automation and integration of business processes are playing a big role in achieving higher efficiency. For example, there was a time when GPS tracking gathered truck location and activity data for only the largest freight hauling specialists. But now there are small and midsize manufacturers and distributors that can track their own fleets, adding a customer feature that improves satisfaction rates and provides analytics that increase efficiencies. VAI, a successful mid-market ERP software developer with IBM midrange customers in the fields of distribution,

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• ERP System Gets an A+ in User Satisfaction

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Infor generally received high marks from users of its A+ application, according to a recent report by the Frantz Group. However, the fact that many users of the IBM i-based distribution system are going five to 10 years between ERP upgrades means many are missing out on potentially valuable features, the report concludes. There were no major revelations in last week’s release of the Frantz Report, titled “Customer Research Survey: Infor A+ and IBM iSeries,” which depicted a swath of North American IBM i shops in the light you would have expected. That is, Infor A+ customers are generally

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• RPG Website Resurrected. Is the Language Next?

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community got a peak at the latest RPG website last week when the official wraps were taken off www.ile-rpg.org. While it may appear to be new, the website is in fact a resurrected (and updated) version of an older website, rpglanguage.biz, that was essentially abandoned by its previous owner. The website’s new owner, TEMBO Tech Labs, is confident that it will help spread the word about RPG’s prowess as a business language. John McCay originally created the rpglanguage.biz website back in 2007 to provide a place where RPG developers could share tips, concerns, and

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• What Koch’s $2.5 Billion Infor Investment Means For IBM i

  November 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Koch Equity Development LLC, the private equity arm of Koch Industries, will invest more than $2 billion into IBM i ERP giant Infor, the companies announced last week. Infor says it will use the cash to expand its business, while news reports say some of it will go to pay off earlier investors in the company. Infor wouldn’t comment on questions about what exactly it’s going to spend KED’s reported $2.5 billion investment, beyond what it said in the press release. Even IBM i customers would benefit, an Infor spokesman said. “All existing and future customers will reap

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• DB2 For IBM i: Made But Not Mastered

  November 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM recently hosted an SAP on IBM i conference for customers and business partners. The conference is described as a showcase of best practices and advice on deployment of the latest technologies. IBM’s lineup of experts included Scott Forstie, DB2 for i Business Architect and a member of the DB2 on i Lab Services team. Forstie says interest in the new analytic features and OLAP functions available in DB2 for i surpasses anything to do with HANA. “Many attendees come to a conference like this to concentrate on better ways to use what they already own and to get the

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• The Supercomputer At The Heart Of The Power Systems Revival

  November 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With both the Supercomputing 2016 conference and Thanksgiving Day behind me, I find myself being thankful that the engineers that helped IBM make the transition from proprietary 48-bit CISC processors to 64-bit PowerPC processors in 1995–yes, that was more than two decades ago–were forward thinking. But as it turns out, there were other technologies, including massive floating point performance and database acceleration, that may in the long run help the entire Power Systems line not only survive, but thrive. We all know that the PowerPC-AS version of the Power line of chips was the only one of several early attempts

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• As I See It: Leave It To Cleaver

  November 28, 2016 Victor Rozek

  The grand paradox of humanity’s quest for wisdom is that the truly great questions have no definitive answers. Age-old questions such as: Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? And does the recent election prove that God exists, or that He doesn’t? These are the eternal questions that haunt us and rob us of sleep. But once in a while, like the proverbial blind squirrel bumping into an acorn, we stumble upon an elusive answer. The question in question is: What single quality in a spouse will be most useful to advancing your career? It’s a deliciously

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