-
i For Business Gets to Lucky Number 7–Dot 1
April 19, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a long time since the OS/400 and i platform got a big software release, and considering how much of the changes that come with the just-announced i For Business 7.1 relate to the integrated database, the virtualization hypervisor, related systems management tools, compilers, and Web application serving middleware, you could make a credible argument that there is not a huge difference between the 6.1 release and the 7.1 release. But, the whole point of the IBM midrange systems for more than 40 years is that there is not really an operating system so much as an integrated
-
It’s Big Picture Time for Application Development Projects
March 8, 2010 Dan Burger
Right away, application modernization sounds like a technical subject. But it really is a business topic. It’s about getting a return on investment by reusing existing assets. Those assets are applications and they need to be enabled for a business environment that has changed since those applications were born and raised. To understand application modernization, it has to be discussed in terms of business strategy, user requirements, and integration. As IBM has been fond of pointing out in the past, the “i” is for integration.
To a large degree, the short history of application modernization has been marked by a
-
Mad Dog 21/21: It’s i or Die for Power in the Midrange
March 1, 2010 Hesh Wiener
Intel has a very strong server chip lineup. Its current Xeon line, dubbed Nehalem, will soon give way to two newer product lines, Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX. Where performance counts more than anything, Power still trumps X64. But where economy is foremost, X64 usually wins. With its new chips, Intel is ready to take on Power in the midrange. IBM’s server business cannot live on mainframe-class machines alone. Consequently, IBM may be about to lose its grip on servers to systems built to shared standards, much the way it lost its power in PCs.
Advanced Micro Devices will also get its
-
Admin Alert: Erasing i5/OS Disk for Fun and Compliance
January 20, 2010 Joe Hertvik
When decommissioning iSeries, System i, or Power i systems, there may be legal considerations in erasing disk drive data. Decommissioning can occur when removing disk drives from a system; when completing a Disaster Recovery Test on an outside provider’s machine; or when an i5/OS machine is sold or returned to a leasing company. The problem is that decommissioning disk drives can easily violate legally mandated compliance standards.
Compliance and Decommissioned Disk Drives
Like most systems, i5/OS data doesn’t necessarily disappear when you reinitialize your disk drives. Clever and determined hackers may be able to reconstruct supposedly erased data if they
-
Microsoft, HP Talk Up Frontline Integrated Systems
January 18, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Everybody wants to have an AS/400 to sell–except, perhaps, IBM. I mean a conceptual AS/400, of course, not literally a machine running OS/400, DB2/400, and RPG/400. Last week, to some fanfare and more than a little confusion, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft said they would be tag teaming to create an integrated set of IT systems under a partnership called Frontline.
Forget that this is also the name of a hard-hitting newscast, or the insecticide that you are too wary of to put on the back of your dog or cat to get rid of fleas and ticks. HP and Microsoft
-
Consume an IWS Web Service From a VB.NET Client
January 13, 2010 Michael Sansoterra
Note: Source code for RPG program CustListR can be downloaded here.
In my article Publish Result Sets Using Web Services and IWS, I demonstrated how to write an RPG program that can return a result set (i.e., multiple rows of data) to a Web service client using an Integrated Web Services (IWS) server instance.
The benefit of using RPG to publish data as a Web service is that any number of clients can consume the Web service, regardless of OS platform or language. This potentially makes your i data and business logic accessible from anywhere! This tip will
-
Power Systems i: The Windows Conundrum
January 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We all live with Windows, and I don’t mean the ones in our walls that let us see outside. By capitalizing the word, and not the Word (which should mean Logos, not a word processor, but that is a different story. . . . ), you all knew I meant Microsoft Windows, a desktop and server operating system, and not the glass panes. Windows is a fact of life in data centers of the 2010s when it was but a dream of Microsoft’s in the 1990s. But running Windows applications does not necessarily mean having to put up with
-
Power Systems i: Serve’s Up
December 14, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If anything is clear about the upcoming eight-core Power7 processors from IBM due in the first half of next year, it is that these processors are going to have a pretty big chunk of processing capacity. And as I am spending a few weeks in the lead story of The Four Hundred going over the problems and possibilities of the Power Systems i line, it seems appropriate to continue to talk about the issues facing the platform and then, in the new year, set about designing a new and revised AS/400 product line, complete with new pricing and packaging to
-
TMW to Give EGL a Chance for i OS App Modernization
December 1, 2009 Alex Woodie
“All we are saying, is give EGL a chance.” You can almost hear the folks in IBM‘s development tool organization in Raleigh, North Carolina, chanting this variation of the old protest song in the hopes of convincing large i OS customers and ISVs to adopt Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) for their application modernization projects. And at least one ISV–trucking software developer TMW Systems of Cleveland, Ohio–is heeding the call, and will give EGL a chance in a pilot project.
TMW develops two RPG-based applications that run on the Power Systems (System i, iSeries, AS/400, i5) platform, including the TL2000
-
IBM Converges Systems Software Into New Business Unit
November 16, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As is usually the case at IBM, the official convergence is often announced long after various product lines were already well on their way toward a confluence behind the scenes. And so it is with a new unit of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group, which put all of its operating systems and hypervisor virtualization software under the control of one group back in early September, but is just talking about it now.
The Systems Software division within STG now has control of all of IBM’s own operating systems and hypervisors, and is being tasked with bringing commonality of