System iNetwork

November 2009

November 30, 2009 3:12 PM

IBM Acquires Security Company Guardium

IBM announced that it has acquired Guardium, a realtime enterprise database monitoring and protection company. Guardium's technology, which includes support for IBM i, helps clients safeguard data, monitor database activity, and reduce operational costs by automating regulatory compliance tasks.

Read IBM's full announcement.

Read eWeek's analysis of the acquisition.

—Linda Harty, executive editor & availability/security/networking/connectivity editor

Posted by lharty on November 30, 2009 at 3:12 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2009 1:10 PM

IT Recruiters and Managers on Hiring and Interview Best Practices

While there's a wealth of information available on general hiring tips (e.g., résumé building, how to interview, etc.), there seems to be a real shortage of relevant hiring information specific to IT. With this in mind, I set out to build a somewhat definitive collection of information for IT pros either out of work or new to the field. I've conducted interviews with a half-dozen specialists in the field, including recruiters, hiring managers, and even one IT guy currently looking for work. (Plus I've received messages through email and Twitter from a handful of people with tips and best practices.)

Below are links to the four-part series I wrote on this topic.

Notes from the Hiring Table, Part 1 - In this first article, I share thoughts from one consulting firm on some of the common practices they use in interviews, such as tricks and traps they set for candidates.

Notes from the Hiring Table, Part 2: The Recruiter Perspective - This article drills deep into the thought process of one of the top recruiters at an IT staffing firm. Learn exactly how recruiters view candidates, plus how you can move from the "no" pile to the "yes" pile.

Notes from the Hiring Table, Part 3: Crafting the Ultimate Résumé Weapon - Articles about résumé building might be overdone and fraught with the same old same old, but I assure you that this piece takes a fresh perspective. In this article I look at the four steps/individuals you need to pass through to get a job—the computer/keyword screening, the recruiter, the HR rep, and the hiring manager—and tell you how to build a resume that can pass all these tests.

Notes from the Hiring Table, Part 4: Become the Ultimate Employee - This article comprises analysis on my part and answers the question: "What 5 skills do you need to have to succeed?"

I hope you enjoy this series—feel free to send me an email if you have any questions or concerns.

Brian Reinholz, training & certification editor

Posted by lharty on November 17, 2009 at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)

November 9, 2009 10:12 AM

In Honor of National Novel Writing Month: An IBM i Tale for the Ages

Last week in the System iNetwork Shooting the Breeze forum, I posted a note about November being National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo—pronounced "nanno-RYE-mo"). I went on to explain that the goal was to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. It's a fun, challenging project for anyone who dreams of writing a novel. Then I somewhat facetiously asked, "Who among us will write some IBM i–related fiction?" Little did I expect that anyone would take up the challenge, but Joe Kennedy, a published System iNEWS author and frequent poster in the System iNetwork forums, rose to the challenge and wrote this wonderful short story about our favorite machine, the IBM i.

The story speaks loudly and clearly about what a fabulous system we have in the i. It's a fun read. Thank you, Joe, for sharing this excellent tale with the i community!

—Linda Harty, executive editor & availability/security/networking/connectivity editor

---

Origin of Servers

A Short Story by Joseph Kennedy

A slow hum could be heard in the background as life breathed once again into the machines that had sat dormant for so many years. The chief engineer was no longer troubled by the rustic conditions and primitive equipment. There were few who understood the technology any longer, and he took pride in his knowledge of both the old and new. The archeologist understood more than he did of the times long ago when these systems ran a good portion of the world's top companies. He understood the minds of the men and women who ran them, the cultures in which they lived, and the social conventions of their day. He didn't understand the hardware, however, or the software, for that matter. He didn't understand that the machines too had a soul of sorts. If not a soul, then perhaps, at least a personality of their own.

"How does it look?" the archeologist chimed in nervously.

"Pretty good. The IPL is beginning—their term for a system startup. I say that we have at least an even shot at this," the engineer responded with the confidence of someone who knew his trade. His tone was reserved enough not to suggest anything more than a good chance. There were no guarantees. He had to re-create several of the components from scratch, but most still worked even after all this time.

The systems had been quiet for so many years that no one ever expected that they would ever come to life again. But the archeologist had a passion (and influence) matched only by the engineer's skill.

"What do you think these systems were used for?"

"Could be anything. Business, casinos, government, manufacturing. They were pretty flexible, if limited" the engineer answered, proud of his peers from a distant age.

"And they saved us during the dark years. At least that's the way I read the history. Others might disagree, but the evidence is more compelling than ever."

"By the dark years, you mean The Sprawl."

The archaeologist nodded. The Sprawl was indeed a dark moment in the collective history of their mutual ancestors. Everyone knew of those years, even if the specifics were known only to a few. Much like the medieval dark ages, those time were shrouded in popular myth. The plagues of those times had a more modern counterpart, the infections and spread during The Sprawl.

Computer power continued to grow at the pace of Moore's law, but managing the machines had become untenable. Electrical power was taxed; servers were redundant simply because of the likelihood of failure. Eventually all of the nation's resources were committed to just maintaining the status quo.

It seemed so silly now that man himself was responsible for the near collapse of civilization. Despite the evidence of the coming storm, the problems that were rampant, they raced along toward the edge of disaster with full knowledge of the risks.

Viruses were commonplace and the systems that were infected were only slightly less so. And they were growing. The problem was known, even obvious, but that didn't make addressing it any the less real. How many other times in history did disaster loom, how many Neros fiddled while their cities burned? Was the trend of mankind to go forward even when prudence dictated otherwise? Perhaps that was the flaw that doomed fabled Atlantis. But the people of this prior age, at the beginning of the millennia, were no myth. The evidence of their existence surrounded the engineer and the archeologist.

"Dave, I was expecting vacuum tubes and much heavier cables. Or is that wrong?" the archeologist mused. His tone always turned familiar whenever discussing an area outside his expertise.

"No, Cal. Vacuum tubes were used but not on these systems. They're from before this time. At least a generation. The storage and cards on these is solid state. This machine is a fairly late model for this iSeries."

"iSeries? I thought this was an AS/400."

"Same thing more or less. I call them that because when I did my first research that was how the manuals referred to them. I'm not sure about why the name changed. Technically this model is Power Systems running 'i'. OS version 26.2 I think."

The histories were an area where Cal's knowledge was far more extensive. He didn't know the technical details but knew the people and cultural background.

"Marketing. It was Big Blue's decision to rebrand the line at different times. It always confused me what they were referring to. I kept seeing documentation with AS/400, iSeries, e-server, System i at different times in history. As late as 2015, I still saw the term AS/400 being used."

"Marketing? I thought that all marketing for this line of servers was a myth."

"There were always stories that suggested that there was a marketing campaign. Perhaps there was. If so, it was secret. Like the rites of the masons or the location of El Dorado."

"We have a sign-on screen!" Dave exclaimed.

"Try the user and password we discovered in those manuscripts. QSECOFR," Cal gasped.

"The letter Q might have had some religious significance to these people, like the Ankh has for the Egyptians," Dave reasoned.

"Perhaps" Cal responded without conviction. "They certainly had such beliefs. Much of the literature of the computer age reads like a battle of religious fervor, and there are plenty of references to the 'Blue Screen of Death.'"

Dave grinned at the use of a keyboard. They seemed so archaic, and the arrangement of the letters was equally amusing. What were they thinking? Still these people managed to produce the earliest Internet and even had some wireless connections. Where had they gone wrong?

A message appeared as Dave hit Enter: "CPF1107 - Password not correct for user profile."

"I was afraid of this. The password is not the default."

"Why would it be? That would be a serious security flaw."

"Now we have to guess. Too many wrong guesses and we could disable the profile. I believe that even with it disabled we can sign on from this console."

The pair tried endless combinations of passwords to no avail.

"Surely they would have left some evidence of a password. At the time the system was shutdown there was no reason to keep it secure," Cal insisted.

"But there was no reason to care. It had served its purpose. They certainly didn't envision that future generations would come here to bring it back up."

The historian and the technician tried all manner of combinations and finally logged in using the password "silverlake."

"We're in."

"What does the log read?"

"It seems that there's a web service running."

"Web service?"

"An early use of Internet access." Cal's knowledge of history meant Dave didn't need to explain the term further.

"If we use a browser, we can review their last notes."

The browser window revealed a personal diary for the last days of the system.

If you are reading this, then you have survived through our trouble times, and our efforts were not in vain. We have been through many trials and tribulations and survived The Sprawl. Computer servers and their management took over our world and despite their numbers continued to fail. They crashed; they were infected with viruses. Many were needed to do the simplest of services. It was a dark age. But still we clung on against hope. As the world around us had upheavals, our systems ran and ran and ran. Through the night, through upgrades, after so many others had failed, our system continued on while their numbers grew.

We cannot be sure why this was, only that there seemed to be an invisible hand at work. Our systems were considered ancient, old, and obsolete. They ran without concern, for years sometimes. They ran all manners of software and applications. No protocol exceeded our grasp, no project was beyond our scope, and yet we languished.

"It seems so odd. What could provoke their leaders to ignore a system so capable?" Dave pondered.

"Airline magazines." Cal informed him. "Executives read articles on airplanes, and that is how they decided what to do."

"Really? How odd. Someone could have written a comic strip lampooning that."

"You would think."

They continued to read.

As time passed, we managed to run accounting, manufacturing, web applications, ftp, ldap, amp, and Domino applications all on the same machine. In cases where that was not practical, we ran them on a different partition using the same hardware. Our systems did not crash and were not susceptible to viruses. We even ran more than one operating system on the same machine, completely independent of each other. Security was built in, not just an afterthought. We even ran additional partitions with other operating systems.

"You mean there were systems where security wasn't part of the design from the start?" Cal gasped.

"Apparently. And legend tells us for every service those systems would have a server. Teams of administrators were needed to manage them."

"Oh, come on. Next you'll tell me they didn't test the code all together before releasing it to the customers or better yet that the systems weren't integrated."

They returned to the text.

But we remained in the minority, ever fighting a rising tide of more numerous, if less capable, systems. The world's computing infrastructure was rampant with designs that were easily compromised and required their programs to be rewritten with each new chip design. Each new generation was caught in a delay. 64-bit chips on those other machines waited for 64-bit code, and 128-bit chips waited for 128-bit code. Our system had no such need. We had TIMI.

"Huh?" Dave exclaimed, "Each new chip required a rewrite of the code? No hardware independence would mean that you would be running older code through some sort of emulator or not using the full chip address. Talk about primitive. Why would they use other systems in such large numbers?"

"Product awareness and industry trends. You see, according to the tomes I've read, executives would usually consult a company that told you what platforms would be running in five or 10 years and then make their decisions based on that," Cal replied.

"And what about their in-house experts?" Dave responded.

"They ignored them for the most part. They figured if an outside expert charged a lot, they must know what they're doing," Cal explained.

"So they must have predicted these machines would last a long time. They weren't subject to the same rewrite of the code that the other platforms were?" Dave reasoned.

"Actually, no." Cal corrected him. "Every few years, 'experts' would predict this 'AS/400' would be obsolete in another five to eight years. They did this for the greater part of the century. Only those who used the machines bought newer ones."

"What did they do when the predictions were wrong? Didn't anyone catch on that they were mistaken?" Dave confusedly asked.

"Apparently not."

"Then these machines must have been very expensive to run. Only the wealthiest companies could afford them."

"Actually the 'Total Cost of Ownership' was less than other machines."

"Wait, wait. You mean that these people had a computer system that was nearly immune from attack, could run thousands of simultaneous users, dozens of services and applications at once, needed a minimal staff, isolated the programs from technological changes, and actually cost less to run?" Dave burst out.

"That's what the evidence suggests. In fact, that's what made me interested in this part of history. I came across an archive of magazines named NEWS/400 in the Smithsonian. They gave credence to a hypothesis I was forming about mankind's early computerized society. What we find here may confirm my theory."

"That theory being?" Dave queried.

"That our entire computerized society is built upon the foundations of these early machines. Without them we would not be here today," Cal responded confidently.

"Amazing! Do you really think so?" Dave replied with a tone that implied he was willing to believe but not completely convinced.

"What are your kids' names?" Cal asked.

"Quincy, Quark, and Quinn. But that's just because Qs are part of tradition for every other generation." Dave flatly countered.

"And where do you work. The headquarters I mean?"

"QBASE."

"Exactly. While those letters are traditional, I think they started with this series of servers. They lasted far longer than anyone suspects today. They survived The Sprawl, and their remnants live today, powering our world," Cal insisted. "Now I will have proof."

Dave nodded his head in understanding and continued his work while Cal read through the diaries. Dave had other pressing matters on his mind. He and his wife were planning on having another child, and he had many choices to make. There were many processors to choose from, whether to make the child a boy or girl, a righty or a lefty. But now he understood how each of his personal upgrades was possible due to the Technology Independent Machine Interface developed so long ago.

The AS/400 design continued on through the ages and eventually became intelligent computers of a near infinite variety of design. Human people had long ago learned of their ascent from the apes and the variations of early mankind, Neanderthal, Homo erectus, Australopithecus, and others. But the Cro-Magnons survived and flourished. Some Darwinian advantage favored them, and the same was true for the design of the System/38. Evolving slowly through the years TIMI gave an advantage that became the AS/400, the iSeries, the System i, and several other names finally becoming the basis for Dave and Cal. Cal could soon stand respectfully with his human co-workers and discuss his own origins with the same pride with which they spoke of prehistoric man. For Dave, a new child would be his prideful joy and yet another offspring that started from this line of servers so long ago.

This short story was written by Joseph Kennedy, who has more than 20 years of experience with the IBM i family of servers. He is currently a system manager for the Teachers' Retirement System of the City of New York. Joe wrote "Be a System i Detective," which appeared in the October 2008 issue of System iNEWS, and has several other technical articles in the works for System iNEWS. Joe is also a frequent contributor to the System iNetwork forums.

Posted by lharty on November 9, 2009 at 10:12 AM | Comments (35)

November 4, 2009 11:11 AM

IBM i ISVs Recognized in Gartner Magic Quadrant

Here's a cool news tidbit that's been waiting patiently on my desk: big gun consulting group Gartner has positioned Tango/04 as a "Niche Player" in its vaunted Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis in its 2009 report on the subject -- a first for Tango/04, a long-time IBM i-focused solution provider.

The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period, and it shows Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.

As for Tango/04, "We offer a unique, integrated solution that covers monitoring of technical infrastructure, Security/Compliance and the Business Services and Processes," explains said Raul Cristian Aguirre, CEO and founder of Tango/04. "So we are pleased to be in this report, as we believe it will surely increase our international visibility."

The IT Event Correlation and Analysis Magic Quadrant evaluates vendors' ability to execute and their completeness of vision regarding their product's capability to "consolidate, analyze and respond to component-level IT infrastructure events, improve their event-to-incident/problem resolution process, and achieve better alignment between events and business-oriented IT services." The net idea is to improve the mean time to isolate and repair problems and to prioritize IT support efforts according to business process value.

"For many years, Tango/04 sole focus has been to help IT Departments to achieve true alignment with business objectives. We think this year’s Quadrant has valued the association of events with potential business impact, and so we are absolutely delighted," Aguirre adds.

For details, including other companies on the list, such as NetIQ, I found a reprint floating free on Gartner's site--apparently published courtesy of BMC Software, which is positioned in Gartner's Leaders Quadrant: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/bmc/article5/article5.html.

So check it out--interesting reading, to be sure--and in case you were wondering, the report usually goes for $1,995.

--Chris Maxcer, news editor

Posted by cmaxcer on November 4, 2009 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

November 3, 2009 9:24 AM

IBM i-related Fiction, Anyone?

November is National Novel Writing Month. Who among us will write some i-related fiction?

The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Check out the details at NaNoWriMo.org. My town is having "write-ins" at local coffee shops and libraries all month. It's a lot of fun! I haven't worked anything IBM i-related into my story yet, but the month is still young.

—Linda Harty, executive editor & security/networking/connectivity/availability editor

Posted by lharty on November 3, 2009 at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)

November 2, 2009 10:42 AM

IBM Touts 235 New Switchers From Sun, HP

IBM is pleased to report that it has snagged 235 customers who moved critical business workloads to IBM servers and storage systems from Sun and HP in the third quarter. Essentially, we're talking about Unix, moving from Sun and HP's Unix flavors over to IBM's AIX.

The latest numbers represent action from IBM's three-year-old Migration Factory program that helps clients move to IBM systems--all told, nearly 2,000 customers have switched to IBM servers and storage, primarily from Sun and HP, including approximately 400 from Sun and 200 from HP this year, IBM says. (IBM does not report how many IBM AIX customers moved from IBM to its competitors, but presumably there's been at least a handful.)

In October, Oracle bragged up its latest benchmarks, calling out IBM. Oracle, of course, is looking to complete an acquisition of Sun, and oh, by the way, IBM says, 84 clients formerly running Sun-based workloads moved over to IBM Power Systems in the third quarter.

To put dollars on the third-quarter action, IBM says it increased the revenue generated from competitive Power Systems displacements of both Sun and HP customers to over $150 million in the third quarter. This amounts to more than $400 million in sales from UNIX competitive takeouts this year.

(I've said it before, if only IBM i had some direct competitors!)

--Chris Maxcer, news editor

Posted by cmaxcer on November 2, 2009 at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)