May 2009

• iCommunity (May 2009) -
• My Seventh Recession and Counting - Recessions have changed hiring practices. New blood is harder to come by in the IBM i world. Companies should take the time now to examine who their next hires will be—and where those people might come from.
• Industry Observer (May 2009) - Greening of Technology Continues * Web 2.0 Revisited * History of Data Storage
• Mainframe Renaissance or Mainframe Séance? - The economic downturn has underscored the mainframe's strong points, but should that recognition translate to a mainframe revival?
• f.y.iSystem (May 2009) -
• IBM Announcements (May 2009) -
• IBM Posts Record Revenue, Yet Lays Off Employees—What Gives? - Sure, IBM isn't the only technology company on the block laying off workers, but it is one of the few that also posted record revenue in 2008. Ouch. As demand for hardware (and perhaps pricing) slips, IBM is shifting to a people-as-profit-drivers model; and people, of course, are easily laid off.
• Hot New Products (May 2009) -
• IPL Your Career - To stay competitive in today's market, you need to learn the skills of tomorrow to keep you ahead of the curve today. Let's take a look at the skills you'll want to develop and where you can go to learn more.
• IBM Systems Have the POWER of Virtualization Built In: A More Efficient IT Infrastructure - Among the many reasons to virtualize your IBM i environment with PowerVM are workload consolidation, resource utilization, a reactive environment, and streamlined workload management; but be aware of the high availability issue.
• Product Roundup: .NET Integration with the IBM i - If integrating your i system with the .NET environment is part of your application modernization plan, check out these products.
• MI for the CL Programmer: Further Examples - Continue your exploration of Machine Interface (MI), by walking through examples of using two MI instructions, one that replaces all occurrences of a character in a character string and another that creates an edit mask--a more powerful alternative to edit words and edit codes--to edit a numeric value.
• Self-Training on a Budget - Training budgets are often the first thing cut in a constricting economy. This time around, however, we have the Internet: a treasure trove of excellent educational resources ranging from free to cheap, and available anywhere at a moment's notice.
• Get Real with PHP - PHP is new and exciting to learn, but the code can quickly become unwieldy and hard to maintain. Following a few PHP conventions will keep your PHP under control.
• Open-Source Web Deployment Tools—What's New - A lot has changed since Zend released Zend Core for IBM i and MySQL AB released its popular open-source database engine on IBM i, introducing a world of open-source solutions to the platform. This article will catch you up on the current state of Zend PHP and MySQL database tools.
• Rapid Weight Gain, Part 1: Where Did Those Journal Pounds Come From? - Are your journals suddenly bloated and sluggish? Ah ha! Hidden entries may be adding unwanted weight. Find out if your system should go on a diet.
• Up Against the Firewall: Why Won't My i Applications Work? - Do you want to leverage all the great GUI apps that let you manage your i system from your PC? Have you tried them and been thwarted by connectivity problems? Learn how you can avoid firewall troubles so you can use all those great tools you've wanted to try.
• IBM Systems Have the POWER of Virtualization Built In: A Technical Look - The many components of PowerVM on Power Systems—logical partitioning, shared processors, storage, network adapters, and management devices—let you maximize your IT infrastructure investment.
• The Quest for Network Quality of Service - Transmission-sensitive services require network Quality of Service. If voice and video traffic are delivered in an unpredictable and unreliable manner, the result is incomprehensible conversations and choppy video. Get up to speed on QoS basics.
• Tech Corner (May 2009) -
• Dr. I Doctor (May 2009) - Dr. I Doctor discusses iSCSI performance and explains the difference between MPLS and VPN
• Special Report: System i and .NET Integration - Fresh graphical application development on the System i can be done in either IBM’s WebSphere or Microsoft’s .NET. WebSphere, however, can be pricey, and its Java language has a long learning curve. Learn how .NET delivers a virtually free, yet very powerful, application development solution.