• Frank Soltis Discusses A Possible Future for Single-Level Storage

  November 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Single-level storage is one of the most unique and compelling characteristics of the architecture underlying the IBM i server and its predecessor business machines. But how would it look running in a massive supercomputer or deep learning system? According to Frank Soltis, who spoke last week at COMMON Europe’s virtual event, it’s something that’s being considered.

  Doctor Frank, of course, is a much-revered figure in the history of the IBM midrange line. He was part of the team at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, that led the development of the single-level storage memory architecture in the S/38 machine that …

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• Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) It is a truth in this world that you get what you pay for, and it is absolutely true for the systems that companies buy to support SAP’s HANA in-memory database and their applications for data warehousing and online transaction processing.

  It is no secret to the Power Systems faithful that IBM’s Power architecture has consistently offered reliability, availability, and serviceability features in both the processor and the system architecture that are superior to X86 alternatives. And the Power Systems platform also offers superior compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth benefits on top of that, …

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• IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

  When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …

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• Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

  The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

  The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 47

  November 23, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  As we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, there is a new security bulletin that has been issued relating to a speculative execution vulnerability that affects Power9 systems running the Virtual I/O Server in general and AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2 in particular. As such, it indirectly affects all four IBM i releases, from 7.1 through 7.4. See Security Bulletin: Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788 at this link.

  The patches to deal with this vulnerability are as follows:

  • IBM i 7.4: MF68089 and MF68090
  • IBM i 7.3: MF68094 and MF68095
  • IBM i 7.2: MF68096 and MF68097
  • IBM i

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• Trinity Guard Unveils New Tools for Linux, Db2 for i

  November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Trinity Guard is on the move. The Houston, Texas, based security software company, which is the spiritual successor to the PentaSafe products, is rolling out a full auditing solution for Linux. It’s also developing a Linux version of its security management tool, TGCentral, with an AIX version up next. Plus it’s months away from releasing an encryption solution for Db2 for i.

  2020 has not been easy for anyone, but it’s not stopping the folks at Trinity Guard from moving forward on its roadmap items. Near the top of that list is increased support for running on Linux, which has …

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• Christmas for Ransomware: How COVID-19 Is Fueling Cybercrime

  November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  American tech professionals may be feeling secure working from home in 2020, but that warm fuzzy feeling quickly turns into a sticky, cold sweat when one realizes all the overtime that cybercriminals are putting in to steal your hard-won resources. The situation is getting so bad that some have taken to calling COVID-19 “Christmas for ransomware.”

  According to Bitdefender’s “Mid-Year Threat Landscape Report 2020,” reports of ransomware increased by 715 percent from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020. The company says that this figure suggests that threat actors upped their ransomware campaigns to …

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• Don’t Count Tape Out Just Yet, ESG Report Says

  November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Public cloud and disk-based backup systems are growing in popularity. But when it comes to keeping up with the explosion in data backup and archive volumes, organizations still are relying on tape to deliver the goods, according to a new report from the Enterprise Strategy Group.

  For Enterprise Strategy Group’s “2020 Tape Landscape” report, which it produced on behalf of the LTO Program, ESG surveyed more than 300 IT professionals from American and Canadian organizations to get a feel for their data protection requirements, with a focus on backup and archive.

  The analyst group determined that the average …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 18

  November 18, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The effects of the coronavirus have forced people around the world to slow down. We have had to learn to go without and be patient due to delays in pretty much everything due to Covid. But the cloud slows down for no person, or virus, and it seems like the race to cloud supremacy is actually heating up, even as nations around the world head into a second round of lockdowns. IBM has no intention of pumping the brakes on its hybrid cloud aspirations, as you’ll notice while perusing our Top Stories this week. And if you are locked down, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 46

  November 18, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  First, thank you to Kent Stoner for catching the error in the IBM i 7.3 Defective PTF. It should have been SI73926 – it has been corrected below. There are new Cumes for IBM i 7.2, IBM i 7.3, and IBM i 7.4, and we made it through Friday the 13^th and the new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 were indeed available. Also, a reminder that there is a new version of Access Client Solutions that is due in the first week of December, and finally, there are no new defective PTFs this week. …

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• Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get surprises very often in the Power Systems market, and even fewer in the IBM i sub-market. But last week, we did get a surprise – and it was a pleasant one – as Big Blue decided that it was going to allow for IBM i 7.1, which has long since been removed from marketing and which was just recently given extended extended support through April 2023, to run on selected models of the Power Systems line using Power9 processors.

  That IBM would allow for this is remarkable, and it shows the economic and technical difficulties that many …

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• Disaster Recovery, At Your Service

  November 16, 2020 Matt Paterini

  (Sponsored Content) Every organization needs a sound disaster recovery plan to protect their business from natural disasters, weather events, cyber-attacks, and other unexpected threats. Disaster recovery strategies can take on different forms depending on the requirements of the business, specifically the defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

  These RTO and RPO metrics are not precisely the same, but they are interrelated and are part of a complete disaster recovery plan.

  The RTO metric is not just a stopwatch that starts ticking between the time applications go down, for whatever reason, and when they come …

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• Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 10 – Debugger Enhancements

  November 16, 2020 Susan Gantner

  Here I go again – more enhancements to talk about that have come about in RDi V9.6. This time, it’s the debugger that has been enhanced. The 9.6.0.7 fix pack included some new goodies for the debugger.

  Both of the enhanced features were popular Requests for Enhancement (RFEs) — the ability to display very large variable values and the addition of a condition to Service Entry Points (SEPs). These are further proof that the RFE process works. If you haven’t visited the RFE site to vote for your favorite suggested features for RDi, do it now. . . or maybe …

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• A Little Less Talk, A Little More Action, Please

  November 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  We can talk until the cows come home about the importance of modernizing the IBM i platform (and we do). But for some of the younger people who call the platform home, all the talk is masking the fact that the window for taking decisive action to take the platform in a bold new direction is shrinking.

  You can count Peter Sørensen, the CEO of IBM i output management software vendor InterForm, as one of the frustrated younger guys. At 40, he’s old enough to have spent a decade working with the platform, but still young enough to feel …

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• IBM Keeps OpenShift Up To Speed On Power Systems

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For more than two years now, as we have previously reported, there have been a number of ways to bring Kubernetes container control to the Power Systems platform, including Docker Enterprise Edition, IBM Cloud Private, and Red Hat OpenShift. In the wake of the Red Hat acquisition, it is pretty clear that OpenShift will be the container environment of choice on IBM System z and Power Systems machines on premises and on these machines as well as X86 iron deployed on the IBM Cloud.

  To that end, we find in announcement letter 220-439 that IBM’s Red Hat unit has …

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• Connectria Bringing IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that want greater integration between their IBM i and cloud systems may be interested in a new offering unveiled yesterday by Connectria. In January, the private cloud company is planning to launch a new hybrid cloud offering that delivers a low latency connection between its hosted IBM i environments and AWS data centers located on the East and West coasts.

  Connectria says its new hybrid cloud offering provides an “ultra-low latency direct connection” between its IBM i and AIX resources and Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions. With just 2 milliseconds of latency between Connectria’s Power Systems …

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• LaserVault Gears Up for ProtecTIER Migrations

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  ProtecTIER customers that are on the hunt for a new VTL system following IBM’s decision to end support for the product have a number of options available to them. For IBM i shops that are concerned about the speed of their backups, they may want to check out the ViTL offering from LaserVault, a longtime IBM i solution provider.

  Speed is one of the big benefits that ViTL brings to the IBM i backup arena, says Rick Wilson, the vice president of sales and solutions for LaserVault, which is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  “We’re not restricted by the size …

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• Remain Software Delivers Trio of Updates

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software last week announced the delivery of new releases of three separate products, including TD/OMS, its lifecycle management tools for IBM i; Gravity, its workflow management system for multiple systems; API Studio, which helps IBM i shops develop and manage API connections to existing software.

  TD/OMS, which is Remain Software’s flagship offering, is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool for IBM i developers. The core of the offering is the Object Management System (OMS), which guides users through the process of defining applications and their associated objects, while additional modules provide more targeted functionality for reporting, impact analysis, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 11

  November 11, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The world is kind of a mess right now, which might be why companies are looking forward to getting out of this year and want to hit the ground running in 2021. For instance, look at Big Blue. In our Top Stories this week, we see IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna is wasting no time with his plans to transform IBM into a hybrid cloud management vendor, as his predecessor Ginni Rometty speculates we are only a quarter of the way into journey to the hybrid cloud. It just goes to show that no matter what phase of quarantine your …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 45

  November 11, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  There is not a lot of action on the PTF front this week, but we once again want to remind you that the new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 are going to be available on Friday the 13th, and so will the Tech Refresh resaves related to them. Also, there is a new version of Access Client Solutions that is due in the first week of December.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs
  • Temporary Storage

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • HIPERs

  PTF Groups …

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