• IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

  Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?

  We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …

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• Guru: Use SQL To Replace Reports

  June 14, 2021 Ted Holt

  Does anybody write report programs anymore? If so, why? Reports are so twentieth-century. The people we serve want spreadsheets, Web pages, cell-phone apps and other modern conveniences. What we need is an easy way to make our report programs write the same information to modern interfaces without having to perform major surgery on them.

  Some 10 years or so ago, I built a scripting language to enable me to reformat spooled files into stream files in CSV format. I called my utility BASS. It was, and continues to be, a successful project.

  But BASS is not the only way …

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• Security Checks Drive Consulting Biz for Briteskies

  June 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With high-profile ransomware attacks becoming the norm and calls for a federal cybersecurity department gaining steam, there’s a distinct uneasiness when it comes to the security of corporate computer systems. That uptick in awareness is helping to drive business for Briteskies, the Cleveland, Ohio-based IT consultancy that has made IBM i security a cornerstone of its business.

  Briteskies was founded in 2000 primarily as a JD Edwards specialist for organizations in the Great Lakes region. Over the years, the company has expanded into other niches, including Magento e-commerce systems, custom RPG development, and computer security.

  The market for IBM i …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 24

  June 14, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Don’t get hyper this week, but the big thing happening in IBM i Land is a set of high impact and pervasive, or HIPER, PTF patches to all four current variants of the IBM i operating system. There are also tweaks to storage PTFs and for the MQSeries message queueing middleware that runs on various platforms from Big Blue, including IBM i.

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

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/V9.2.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for

  … Read more

• Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …

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• Watson-Inspired Pattern Matching Drives IBM i Performance Breakthrough

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What do human diseases and IBM i performance problems have in common? For starters, they both can generate quite a bit of data. In the case of the humans, it was enough for IBM to train its AI technology, Watson, to find patterns buried in the data and come up with diagnoses. Now the Danish software company iPerformance is using a variation on that approach with GiAPA, its Global i Application Performance Analyzer.

  When iPerformance founder Kaare Plesner saw a demo of IBM Watson developing medical diagnoses, he figured a similar approach could work for sorting through the reams of …

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• Certified Pre-Owned Storage: More Than Just A Pretty Price

  June 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  People tend to think first and foremost about servers when they think of IT infrastructure, but a true system, even if it is a monolithic, standalone server with as few as one or as many as 16 sockets, always includes storage. And in distributed systems that can grow beyond the scale up limits of NUMA machines and scale out to add compute capacity, they always include storage (whether converged on the server nodes or run alongside the cluster on the network) and they also always include networking.

  No matter what, storage is a big component of every enterprise system, ranging …

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• Security Vendor Shopping Spree Continues for HelpSystems

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems quietly nabbed two more security software vendors last month, Agari and Beyond Security, just days after it brought on a new investor, a private equity firm called Harvest Partners Structured Capital.

  The deal to bring in Harvest Partners SCF, LP was announced on May 6, when HelpSystems announced that a definitive agreement has been signed for HP SCF to take a minority stake in the company, joining existing investors TA Associates, Charlesbank Capital Partners, HGGC, and HelpSystems employees.

  HP SCF principal Chris Peyser, who will take a place on HelpSystems board, lauded the Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company for its …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 9

  June 9, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Remember the days of summer camp? As a kid, summer camp memories might include swimming and hiking, roasting marshmallows, and even feeling a little homesick. Common Europe has reimagined summer camp with the IBM i professional in mind, and you don’t even have to go anywhere to join in on the fun. Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition begins running live on the Internet on June 14, and it is free to attend. Topics will include the IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems as implemented on Power hardware. You can get more information and find out how …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 22

  June 9, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  We are playing a little catch up after the Memorial Day holiday here in IBM i PTF Land. It was fairly quiet over the holiday weekend, with a set of PTF updates for the Hardware Management Console. To be specific, take a look at PTFs MH01889 and MH01890, which are an interim fix, or ifix as IBM calls them, for HMC V9 R2 M951 running on virtualized X86 or Power servers, respectively. See this link for more information.

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

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • DB2 Web Query for i V2.2.1
  • Content

  … Read more

• Forrester Consulting Weighs Costs, Benefits of IBM i

  June 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i supporters often cite the low cost of ownership, integrate nature, and self-management features of the platform as key advantages over competing systems. To try to put some actual data behind those assertions, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting, which recently presented its findings in a report titled “The Total Economic Impact of IBM i.”

  To get an understanding of the IBM i server’s unique financial characteristics, Forrester Consulting, which is an offshoot of the main tech analyst firm called Forrester Research based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, interviewed four current users of the system. It collected data about the relative costs and …

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• Taking A Centralized Approach To IBM i Security

  June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are branching out and doing new things here at IT Jungle, and one of them is using video as well as text to get information about the IBM i platform across. Video is certainly not a new thing, and we have done a bit of it as part of consulting engagements, but starting now it is going to be part of what we do on an ongoing basis. We are grateful to IBM i security and high availability software vendor Precisely for initially supporting us in this endeavor.

  For our first video interview, we sat down with John Vanderwall, …

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• Guru: The Essential Workers Of IT, And Lessons Learned From Trying Times

  June 7, 2021 Rob McNelly

  Over the past year we’ve all heard about essential workers. Essential workers are present in our industry as well. Those who manage and maintain our power grids and technology infrastructures have always played a vital role. It’s easy to overlook these professionals, but they shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2020, their mostly unnoticed efforts were particularly important.

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not necessarily putting IT workers on the same level as healthcare workers or first responders. My point is simply that during the pandemic, we were reminded that some aspects of our jobs can only be accomplished by …

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• As I See It: The Reluctant Return

  June 7, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Another day, another questionable announcement from the CDC. This time it was a guideline suggesting that vaccinated people need not wear masks in most circumstances; a pronouncement that many experts found to be both ill-advised and premature.

  Nonetheless, many heard it as an invitation to return to normalcy. Long-suffering restaurant and bar owners exhaled for the first time in many months, and everyone seemed delighted just to see the bottom half of their friends’ faces again.

  One group in particular was unabashedly eager to return to the pre-pandemic past: CEOs. Newsweek reported on a poll conducted by the Best Practice …

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• Get Virtually Packed For Common Europe Power Summer Camp

  June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is still not in the swing of things when it comes to business travel, trade shows, and conferences, and in many ways that is a good thing because events that were not physically accessible to many of us are now virtually accessible. Provided that you can deal with some time zone changes from time to time.

  Such is the case with Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition, which is running live on the Internet June 14, 15, and 17. No, that is not a typo, the event is skipping a day on June 16, perhaps to …

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• Modern Tools For A Modern IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops may be in for a rude awakening when they suddenly realize their applications are not keeping up with the times. How can these IBM i shops get on the right track in the modernization department? A trio of IBMers offered some tips.

  Brad Bentley, Tim Rowe, and Kris Whitney took to the virtual airwaves last week to present “IBM Tools for Modernizing Your IBM i Applications,” a one-hour webinar from IBM. Application modernization is an extremely broad topic, as the 266-page IBM Redbook of the (almost) same name will attest to, so they obviously didn’t cover …

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• Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Brian Barth

  Cyber threats have evolved from the traditional vectors of theft and direct attacks to more financial driven cyber destruction and extortion, especially via ransomware. Hospitals, manufacturers, universities and financial institutions have all been attacked in the last year, and the rate of attacks is increasing as networks become more accessible to support remote workers. The Colonial Pipeline attack has demonstrated that even the critical infrastructure that supports our supply chains is not invulnerable.

  In 2021, more than three quarters of attacks are financially motivated, and over half of those attacks are ransomware – an attack in which files are typically …

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• Keeping Up With Open Source Security Updates

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Open source is a source of technological innovation on IBM i, in multiple respects. But it also opens the platform up to additional security vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of security patches, for the core operating system as well as the open source technologies that are helping to transform it.

  IBM does a good job of keeping up with security vulnerabilities are found in the operating system as well as the multitude of open source technologies that are included with it. In the last five weeks, IBM has issued several security bulletins for core open source …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 26

  May 26, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  In yet another sign of a return toward normal, whatever that will be post-pandemic, COMMON held its NAViGATE conference and exhibition this week, welcoming attendees virtually — as well as live and in person — to learning sessions and an expo. Continue to follow IT Jungle for news coming out of NAViGATE as we all look forward to seeing what our IBM i ecosystem has in store as businesses begin to reopen and start the work of moving beyond the challenges of adapting to COVID-19. The current news of the week is a hodgepodge of topics, which is a nice …

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