The IT Jungle

IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

As we have pointed out …
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Disaster Recovery: From OS/400 V5R3 To IBM i 7.4 In 36 Hours

March 27, 2023 Jason Hardy

Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap: Three Mistakes That Leave You Stuck that described how a series of decisions related to how you manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.

With their busiest weekend of the year just days away, GCI, an Ohio-based company, had all …
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The Disconnect In Modernization Planning And Execution

March 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

Feeling confident in your IBM i or mainframe application modernization plans? That could be due to your lack of understanding of what is about to transpire once you begin the project, according to a new survey from EvolveWare.

EvolveWare, the Santa Clara, California, provider of modernization tools, last week released a study called The State of Application Modernization 2023. The 18-page report is based on a fourth-quarter survey conducted by Global Surveyz (that is not a typo) of 200 large American companies in financial services, insurance, and healthcare that are either in the midst of an application modernization …
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Superior Support: One Of The Reasons You Pay The Power Systems Premium

March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you are advocating for the Power Systems platform, and the IBM i operating system on top of it, within your organization, you need every bit of evidence you can find that demonstrates the return on investment for that premium price.

Which is why we are pointing out an IDC MarketScape study that Big Blue just posted as a reprint on its download site covering worldwide support services for the global leaders in enterprise IT. You know, companies like IBM as well as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Pure Storage, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, Juniper Networks, and …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 13

March 27, 2023 Doug Bidwell

This week, the IBM i community has to take a look at two new security vulnerabilities. There are PTF updates for IBM Navigator for it that you need to look at. The updated details for the PTFs for Navigator for i are in the link in the ACS_NAV worksheet. And there is also a defective PTF you probably need to take a look at, too.

Now, on to the security vulnerabilities.

First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to cross-site scripting in the Admin Console (CVE-2023-26283), which you can find out more about here. For …
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IBM i Has a Future ‘If Kept Up To Date,’ IDC Says

March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

The slow demise and death of IBM i has been greatly exaggerated, at least in the eyes of IDC. In a white paper for Rocket Software, an analyst for the storied firm says that IBM i does indeed have a future in customers’ digital strategies, provided it’s “kept up to date.” That’s good news for the community, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Application modernization has been an important topic for IBM i shops for decades, particularly when it comes to organizations that believe they’re still living in the early 1990s. While you technically can run …
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When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

To be a managed …
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Generative AI: Coming to an ERP Near You

March 22, 2023 Alex Woodie

Don’t look now, but generative AI technology like ChatGPT is spreading into every aspect of computing, including the large enterprise applications at the heart of business. The technology may not be on IBM i-based ERP suites yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

The sophistication of AI technology has been building steadily for the past 10 years, thanks to the adoption of massive neural networks that can be trained on huge amounts of unstructured data, such as text and images.

Dubbed deep learning, the brute-force approach paid handsome dividends for two computational problems in particular: computer vision and natural …
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Four Hundred Monitor, March 22

March 22, 2023 Jenny Thomas

We’ve seen the layoffs of tech employees ramping up as of late. Amazon, Meta (nee Facebook), Twitter, Yahoo, Zoom, and the list goes on, have all announced significant personnel cuts in 2023. It’s a big turnaround from the midst of the pandemic, when tech companies were on a hiring spree to keep up with the surge to go online when everyone was stuck at home. The good news is IT pros with cybersecurity, cloud, and data analytics/machine learning skills have remained in high demand. We hope our efforts to keep you informed on these topics and learning opportunities have kept …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 12

March 22, 2023 Doug Bidwell

We are always on the hunt for something new, but sometimes we find something that is not new but is new to us and maybe you, too. Here is a case in point: The IBM i 7.4 section on the IBM documentation site was last updated in the last half of the year 2021 and now describes the enhancements made to ILE RPG after 7.4 with PTFs. You can see it here. Also, we wanted to point out that we have re-organized the ACS_NAV worksheet contents, adding a bunch of links to documents and several YouTube links. That is …
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Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb

March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.

In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of …
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VS Code Is The Full Stack IDE For IBM i

March 15, 2023 Jeff Tickner

Back in January, we talked a bit about the rise of the VS Code integrated development environment that was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2015 and that has been increasingly adopted by developers on all kinds of platforms, not just Windows Server. This week, we want to talk about the new features we are exposing in VS Code for users of the application development tooling available from ARCAD Software.

First of all, we have brought the cross reference information in our ARCAD Observer tool into VS Code in a way that developers can access the object-level and field-level …
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Domino Runs on IBM i 7.5, But HCL Still Working on Power10

March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that use Domino to serve email and drive other forms of communication will be happy to know they can run Domino 12.2 on IBM i 7.5. However, if they want to run the setup on a Power10 server, they will need to wait a little longer for HCL to support it.

Back in 2017, HCL Technologies took over development and maintenance of the Domino and Notes product line from IBM. Two years later, the India-based tech firm pushed out version 10 of Domino and Notes and related products (like Sametime, Traveler, and Verse), the first major …
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Four Hundred Monitor, March 6

March 15, 2023 Jenny Thomas

March Madness is taking on a different meaning this year. Yes, it’s still the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament that fans look forward to every year, but March 2023 has also been a little crazy. Parts of Northern and Southern California have been covered in snow, burying roads and houses, disrupting power, and snapping branches off trees in areas that aren’t prepared for more than an occasional light dusting snow. The Federal government is attempting to stave off panic in the banking industry following the collapse of two banks. And let’s just not even think about world politics right …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 11

March 15, 2023 Doug Bidwell

Even when there is not a lot going in with PTF Groups or security vulnerabilities or other things with the IBM i platform, there is always something going on with the IBM i PTF Guide. This week is a slow one, and so that gave us time to catch up on the links embedded within the Guide. Keep an eye out for them next week and also for a video log for Access Client Services.

Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

PTF Groups 7.5:
- HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
PTF …
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You Ought To Be Committed

March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a phrase that we learn as teenagers, concomitant with the kinds of peer pressure that close friends can bring to bear early in our lives to nudge us, that applies in an inverse way to a portion of the IBM i customer base, or probably more precisely, to the upper management at a portion of the company that thinks – erroneously – that getting off the IBM i platform is somehow going to magically fix their particular IT problems.

All talk and no action.

Don’t get us wrong. We are not trying to get people to move off …
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Thoroughly Modern: What You Need to Know About IBM i Security

March 13, 2023 Fresche Solutions

On a weekly basis, the security experts at Fresche receive calls from IBM i organizations asking for help with ransomware and cyberattacks. These calls are from a broad range of organizations across the spectrum of industries and company sizes.

The IBM i platform has a very strong reputation of being secure, but it’s a dangerous misconception that it is secure out of the box. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen an enormous lack of security configuration on the system. It’s often due to a lack of security knowledge and skills on IBM i. But many people still …
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Spring Brings Events To IBM i Community, And More

March 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

As the calendar flips over from winter to spring, the IBM i community begins to stir in anticipation of in-person get-togethers. Many of the events continue to be virtual, but some, like COMMON’s POWERUp and WMCPA’s iCON, are expected to draw hundreds of people. And the calendar shows that IBM’s spring Tech Refresh can’t be too far away.

The in-person fun kicks off tomorrow as members of the IBM i community descend on the Lake Lawn Resort in Delavan, Wisconsin, which is playing host to the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association (WMCPA) and its Spring Conference 2023.

The three-day …
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As I See It: AI-AI-O

March 13, 2023 Victor Rozek

Unless you think encouraging people to eat glass is a good thing, or you happen to revel in being compared to Hitler, you probably weren’t all that impressed with the recent Big Tech AI roll out. To say it was unimpressive would be a kindness. Arguably, it was a grade A, prime time, gold-plated disaster.

Take Meta Platform’s online tool Galactica. Please. It was quickly yanked offline when, according to The Washington Post, “users found Galactica generating authoritative-sounding text about the benefits of eating glass, written in academic language with citations.” I have to admit, the citations were …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 10

March 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

Here is what is new this week: Fixes. To be specific: Long Term Support release: 9.2.0.10 client install image for IBM MQ on IBM i release level: 9.2.0.10-IBM-MQC-IBM_i. IBM MQ is also known as WebSphere MQ also known as MQ Series, and it is the message queuing middleware that Big Blue has been selling since 1993. Yup, that is 30 years ago, and this tool is one of the foundations of the microservices movement. It is Kafka-esque. Or, more precisely, Kafka is MQ-esque.

Anyway, here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last …
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