The IT Jungle

Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …
Read more
Data Needs To Be Anonymized For Dev And Test

November 14, 2018 Scott Heinlein

(Sponsored Content) Every company needs to create applications and then test those applications against a database that has real data in it. And therefore, most companies will take their test data from production databases and make a copy of it, or a subset of it, to do such testing, usually by doing a bulk copy. And at that moment, all of the sensitive data in that database is exposed to the programmers and testers.

Given that in excess of 80 percent of information leaks start from an internal source, this is a potential – and possibly great – …
Read more
HelpSystems Gets Into JAMS for Scheduling

November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

HelpSystems yesterday announced the acquisition of MVP Systems Software, the Connecticut-based developer of the JAMS workload management and scheduling software. While JAMS supported IBM i, HelpSystems will count on the product to deliver capabilities primarily in the open systems realm, with cloud possibilities looming in the future.

The acquisition came together as the result of mutual respect that HelpSystems and MVP Systems Software had for each other, says Kate Bolseth, general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems.

“We’ve known each other for years in the workload automation space and I’d say that we’ve both been very impressed with one …
Read more
Four Hundred Monitor, November 14

November 14, 2018 Jenny Thomas

I learned a valuable lesson this week: never stick your hand in the middle of a dog fight. Now, that may seem like common sense, but sometimes in that moment of panic when you’re trying to figure out what to do, you do something dumb. But it got me thinking about the efforts of our community who look to help each other out whether it be through a free webinar, a virtual training, or a product so our readers will know exactly what to do – or not to do — if disaster strikes. IT Jungle also plays a vital …
Read more
IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 45

November 14, 2018 Doug Bidwell

We are winding down to the final seven weeks of the year, which means that we have just seven PTF guides to go in 2018! That being said, news on the PTF front continues to be sparse. Case in point, another week of no new defectives. Of course, you never know what next week will bring, but in the meantime, let’s look at what did happen this week. We got a new security bulletin and learned that IBM i is affected by networking BIND vulnerability CVE-2018-5740. The associated remediating PTFs are: Release 7.3 – SI68466; Release 7.2 – SI68467; Release …
Read more
Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …
Read more
Maxava Adds New Products, Partners, And Users Around The World

November 12, 2018 Marco Govender

(Sponsored Content) Maxava, a worldwide developer of best in class disaster recovery and high availability software for the IBM i platform have been busy rolling out their bundled offering that includes their new products Mi8 for Cloud based monitoring, Mi7 for Cloud based security monitoring, and CPR, which is a recycle bin for the IBM i.

Simon O’Sullivan, senior vice president at Maxava, says: “Our strategy of having all these products designed to work together in concert has been a great move for us as a company. We are winning new partners and new customers around the world.” …
Read more
Guru: Configure Collection Services

November 12, 2018 Dawn May

Collection Services collects valuable information about your partition and the workloads you are running. While many think of Collection Services as performance data, it is really systems management data and at some point you will need that data. Collection Services helps you understand the overall workload running on your system and trends over time. It provides the ability to look backwards in time to understand “How did I get here?” and has the data to answer a wide variety of other questions.

Collection Services is on by default, so whether you know it or not, you are running Collection Services. …
Read more
Mad Dog 21/21: Phoenix Envy

November 12, 2018 Hesh Wiener

IBM is understandably concerned that its annual revenue, likely to be about $80 billion this year, is 25 percent less than it was in 2011, when it reached nearly $107 billion. The company’s revenue increased during the first two quarters of 2018 after falling every quarter for five and a half years, but its falling fortunes have discouraged customers, employees, and investors. Apple, the largest technology company in the world, boasts revenue that is three times that of IBM. It nearly failed in 1997, but Microsoft helped it rise from its own ashes like the Phoenix.

The …
Read more
IBM Winds Down PowerVM V2, Nudges Customers To PowerVM V3

November 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may not occur to you, but the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor that Big Blue created for Power Systems servers has a version just like every other piece of software in the world, and like all software, it ages and eventually it is retired from the field in lieu of more modern code.

In announcement letter 918-129, IBM let it be known that PowerVM V2, of which there were three releases, will be withdrawn from marketing on February 19, 2019 and will have its support withdrawn on September 30, 2020. That may seem like a long time away from …
Read more
Modernizing IBM i Apps with Microservices

November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

Application modernization means different things to different people. For some, it could be turning a 5250 screen into a Web or mobile interface, or replacing database access with SQL. But for others in the IBM i community, including the vendor OpenLegacy, modernization refers to exposing existing business logic as APIs through a microservices architecture.

Microservices refers to a software development technique whereby applications are broken down into multiple self-contained components and served via APIs in a loosely coupled but coordinated manner. The main advantage of this approach is each microservice is built independently of others, which can boost productivity and …
Read more
Cloud Cover

November 7, 2018 Victor Rozek

(Sponsored Content) Imagine for a moment that you’re on a floundering ship, surrounded by angry water. You look around for a lifeboat only to discover they are stored below deck, in the vessel rather than hanging off the side where they might actually prove useful.

But that effectively describes an equally chancy IT practice: conducting system-monitoring activities from within the system. When the digital waters rise, the value of a monitoring method vulnerable to a variety of server and facility mishaps greatly diminishes. Once disaster strikes, there is ample irony but scant comfort in restarting monitoring operations after …
Read more
iSphere Upgrade Bolsters RDi Even More

November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

When it comes to IBM i programming tools from IBM, Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) is the integrated development environment at the top of many professionals’ wish lists. However, the IDE’s functionality is lacking a few departments, which provides an opportunity for innovation in the community, as IBM originally envisioned. One of the projects that’s been running with the ball is the popular iSphere project, which recently unveiled a new release.

iSphere is a free plug-in for RDi and WDSC that was first released by Frank Hildebrandt of Task Force IT-Consulting back in 2013. The original idea behind the …
Read more
Four Hundred Monitor, November 7

November 7, 2018 Jenny Thomas

We may have gained an hour over the weekend, but I am definitely not feeling like I am getting ahead. However, since November is the month to remind us to be thankful for the many positive things happening in our life, I figure this is also a good time to remember why we are grateful for our IBM i ecosystem. Not only has it sustained us these many years, but it seems there is always more to look forward to. Our Calendar below shows there is plenty of activity yet to go this year, and COMMON is already putting out …
Read more
IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 44

November 7, 2018 Doug Bidwell

Hello fellow residents of IBM i Land. In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, there are new HIPER PTFs for all releases – that’s IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 – and there is a new Security group for IBM i 7.3. It is rather sparse this week, and we suspect it will kick up next week. So enjoy the relatively easy week of IBM i patching.

At a glance defective PTFs: There are no new defectives this week (11/01), looking good so far!
```
Defective PTF rundown (The last defective for each release):

	Defect		Defective	APAR	
```
… Read more
IBM i In The Land Of The Rising Sun

November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It took Europe and Japan a long time to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, but it is absolutely no coincidence that the United States alone or in combination with its NATO allies invested an enormous amount of money in the rebuilding of both of these nations. Not only was it good business, providing American manufacturers new markets into which to sell their products, it was also a good kind of cultural exchange.

The predecessor of IBM, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, sold its first punch card machine into the Japanese market back in 1925 at Nippon Pottery – yes, …
Read more
Cloud Provider Connectria In Major Partnership Push

November 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

The IBM i cloud market is quite fragmented, with dozens of companies angling to deliver IBM i hosting services, often to a geographic or industrial niche. Now one of the biggest fish in this little pond, Connectria, is looking to solidify its foothold in IBM i cloud hosting by building a network of VARs, software vendors, and other companies that share its vision.

In May, IBM i chief architect Steve Will teased us about Google getting into the IBM i hosting business. While IBM and the Alphabet subsidiary work together with the OpenPower consortium, there’s still no indication that Google …
Read more
Guru: More About Merge

November 5, 2018 Ted Holt

I often read back through articles that have appeared in this august publication to look for errors and omissions. Such an expedition recently made me aware that I have not told you as much as I would like to about the SQL MERGE statement. Today I am pleased to provide more information.

First I want to be sure that everybody understands is that you can add conditions to the WHEN MATCHED and WHEN NOT MATCHED expressions. That means that you do not have to treat all matched or unmatched rows in the same way. Look at this example:
```
merge . 
```
… Read more
As I See It: Rethinking Retirement

November 5, 2018 Victor Rozek

As all evangelists before and since have been compelled to do, 19th century preacher Dwight Moody gave some advice to the young. “Preparation for old age should begin not later than one’s teens,” he said. “A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.”

The start-early portion of Moody’s advice is well intended but wildly unrealistic. Teenagers have no more comprehension of life after retirement than elephants have of space travel. Besides, when life’s essentials are steadily provided for you, there’s little to suggest that someday they might cease to be. Regardless, the …
Read more
I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …
Read more

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search