• IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.

  I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …

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• Guru: Overloading Subprocedures

  October 5, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  The ability to overload subprocedures in RPG is something I had been waiting for a long, long time. IBM finally made it available through a Technology Refresh (7.4, TR1 or 7.3 TR7). If you are not familiar with the term, overloading (in RPG) is the ability to create multiple subprocedures of the same name with different implementations.

  Let’s have a look at how overloading might benefit us when it comes to writing programs and subprocedures. This is a portion of a prototype copy member that, amongst others, contains the prototypes of these three subprocedures:

  dcl-pr format_from_Date varChar(10) extProc(*dclCase);
    dateIn date(*ISO) 

  …

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• Seiden Group Helps Bring Community PHP To The Japanese Market

  October 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The new community edition of PHP is gaining interest from IBM i shops around the world. Now one of the biggest IBM i service providers in Japan, Chubu Systems Corp., is working with Seiden Group to ensure that Japanese IBM i shops have the latest, greatest distribution of PHP to work with.

  As you may have heard, there is a new open source PHP runtime for IBM i that is being distributed via RPM, which is IBM’s preferred method for sharing open source software on IBM i. The new community edition of PHP is free, and essentially replaces …

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• The Smearing Of Infrastructure And Platform Clouds

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The largest public clouds on the planet are also among the most secretive and influential companies in the IT sector, and therefore despite events that go one for days or, now in the time of coronavirus, for weeks on end, we get very little actual information out of them about specifically what is going on in the cloud market with any amount of specificity.

  Yes, everybody and anybody who is an incumbent in the IT sector talks about how their “cloud” business is doing, and at least one of the big IT market researchers is sort of throwing up its …

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• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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• Does IBM i Need Its Own Zowe?

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Getting open source software onto platforms like IBM i and System z is a big focus of IBM, its big iron customers, and the ecosystem of tool and service providers that tread these waters. In 2018, IBM, CA Technologies, and Rocket Software collaborated to create the Zowe framework as a part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, with the goal to extend System z-based services into the greater open source IT landscape. Is it time for a similar effort on IBM i?

  When Zowe launched two years ago, the Open Mainframe Project (OMP) boasted that Zowe would “serve as …

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• Is 2030 The New Y2K?

  September 30, 2020 Michael Killian

  In the world of IBM i transformation, time may not be your friend. RPG resource availability is at an all-time low, and forecasts do not look promising for any resurgence. That fact, combined with the reality that a full-blown transformation initiative can take several years on average, simply means that putting off aggressive digital transformation activity is no longer an option for most organizations.

  Without People, Technology Doesn’t Matter!

  There’s a great book called The Technology Fallacy: How People Are The Real Key To Digital Transformation, which anyone considering a transformation initiative should consider reading. The book doesn’t focus …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 30

  September 30, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  One of the topics that never seems to go to the backburner at IT Jungle is security. We write articles on the regular about solutions and analyze options and concerns. Our top story this week is a grim reminder of how prevalent cyberattacks remain and why the safety of our data should always be on our minds. It is always one of the hot topics of the IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is underway again this year and your voice is needed to help strategize what’s to come in 2021. You’ll find the survey link in our Redbooks, White Papers, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 39

  September 30, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  This week, right off the bat, there are a few things you need to be aware of. First of all, there are microcode patches for a bunch of systems.

  Specifically, they are for MTMs – that is short for machine type/model in the business partner lingo – 9008-22L, 9009-22A, 9009-41A, 9009-42A, and 9223-22H. To save you from having to run around the Internet to figure out what machines they are, that is the Power L922 (a Linux-only machine), the Power S922, the Power S914, the Power S924, and the Power H922 for SAP HANA. You can find out more at …

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• Max Thread Room

  September 28, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a lot of organizations that buy servers and create systems out of them, the overall throughput of each single machine is the most important performance metric they care about. But for a lot of IBM i shops and indeed even System z mainframe shops, the performance of a single core is the most important metric because most IBM i customers do not have very many cores at all. Some have only one, others have two, three, or four, and most do not have more than that although there are some very large Power Systems running IBM i. But that …

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