• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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• IBM i 7.2 End Dates Revealed as Power7 Shutdown Looms

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM surprised nobody last week when it announced that it will stop selling IBM i 7.2 next April and cease supporting the operating system a year later. The lead time should give IBM i shops plenty of runway to prepare their upgrade strategies and transition to newer versions of the operating system. A potentially more impactful deadline for those not paying close attention is the end of hardware support for Power7 boxes in less than two weeks.

  Last week’s announcement of end of sales and support for IBM i 7.2 and related software products was not unexpected. That’s because IBM …

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• IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.

  The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 18

  September 18, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  This week, Steve Will, Chief Architect of the IBM i, tweeted out the link this week for new followers. It’s interesting to think there are still new followers popping up, but if you’re one of the Twitter holdout, you might want to consider giving it a try. The Twitter-verse gives us direct access to the movers and shakers of our ecosystem (not to mention the writers of IT Jungle), and it’s a great place to see the chatter around our little ecosystem. Of course, if you still don’t think Twitter is for you, you can always count on Four Hundred …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 37

  September 18, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First up, IBM has a new support site for IBM i customers coming in October. You can see a video describing this at this link. And now back to our regularly scheduled PTF programming. In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, we find that there are new HIPERs and new Security groups for all four current releases – that’s IBM i 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4.

  We don’t have any new links in the Guide this week, and we came up dry on tips, too. (It is like that some days.)

  The Guide at a …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to impossible or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

  (That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …

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• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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• Unperspective: In Your Face

  September 16, 2019 Trevor Perry

  A few years ago, I was asked to present a keynote session for a conference and the request was something along these lines: “I would like to learn how to change the other programmers in my shop – they won’t evolve with the times.” What a great challenge! I was ready to find the answer.

  I spent some time researching this topic, and my initial thoughts were confirmed. Humans, generally, are afraid of change. As we age, our comfort zone becomes smaller – and more comfortable. We know we are good at what we have been doing for years, and …

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• Maxava Hits Multiple Targets With The Same HA Arrow

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Downtime is never a good thing for any business, except maybe for those who sell high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for a living. And to be honest, these companies explicitly want to keep the downtime and the recovery time to the smallest period as possible. The fear of downtime should be enough to motivate us all to replicate out systems.

  But sometimes, just having two systems in a high availability cluster is not enough. Some companies need belts with their suspenders, and maybe even a bunch of different belts because they really can’t be down. To that end, …

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• IBM i Headed To Azure By Way Of Skytap

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run their IBM i workloads on the Azure cloud will soon be able to, thanks to a new partnership that Skytap and Microsoft unveiled today. As part of the new offering, Microsoft will install Power9 servers in an Azure data center and Skytap will manage the IBM i, AIX, and Linux environments on behalf of clients.

  Skytap turned heads in the IBM i community earlier this year with the introduction of a public cloud service that’s unlike anything that came before it. The Seattle, Washington, company unveiled an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering …

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• PTC Completes Database Support In Implementer

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As a change management tool, PTC’s Implementer is well-regarded among IBM i users for its ability to track development tasks and smooth out the promotion process. While the product has mostly been used to track source code in programming languages like RPG and Java, customers have increasingly been putting business logic into Db2 for i. With the recent launch of Implementer 12.3, PTC has wrapped up planned enhancements for the database.

  PTC‘s Implementer provides a full range of capabilities for managing development processes for IBM i shops. The software works closely with IBM‘s Rational Developer for i (RDi) …

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• Fresche Hires Database Modernization Expert

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i database modernization expert Birgitta Hauser has a new software house to call home following her hiring at Fresche Solutions. The new gig marks the start of a new era in the German’s 20-year career on the IBM i, and adds to Fresche’s growing arsenal of midrange talent.

  IBM i shops around the world are under pressure to either modernize their systems or migrate to something newer. While IBM i applications largely do what they were designed to do, the requirements have changed, and the siren call of digital transformation and big data analytics is too hard for …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 11

  September 11, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  For many of us, life is settling back into familiar routines as schools go back into session across the U.S. and we all hunker back down at our desks to get done what we put off for the summer before the holidays show up to derail us again. But before we get to the IT news of the week, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge today – Patriot Day – as the day we remember those who died or were injured during the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

  Top Stories From Outside

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 36

  September 11, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Some weeks are more exciting than others here in PTF Land. We’ve got some new links to tell you about and a couple of other tidbits to share. But the exciting news for IBM i customers this week is the reveal of a new Support Site coming from IBM in October! Find out more by viewing this video.

  Now back to the Guide. First, you may notice some differences when you download this week’s edition. Be aware we added a cover page as a first worksheet.

  In terms of what to look for, you will see new version …

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• Talking Digital Transformation With The New And Prior CEO

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a situation that each and every IT manager and chief information officer has experienced and will continue to experience: Having a very long conversation with the president or chief executive officer of their company about how to engage in or continue with digital transformation and the application and database modernization that this entails. And sometimes, that conversation will happen as a new person takes the helm of the company.

  That’s precisely what we did this week, but with a twist or two. We are not an IT manager or CIO, but rather an observer in the boardrooms of …

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• Software Change Management Has To Change With The DevOps Times

  September 9, 2019 Philippe Magne

  (Sponsored Content) It is easier to change a system or a software development stack than it is to change the habits and preferences of people. People are the biggest friction in adopting new technologies – right up until the moment they are not. And then they are easy. So it is with any technology, and the transition from traditional software change management to open source DevOps tools is no different.

  It is ironic, perhaps, that the change comes last to the tools that track the changes. But the move to DevOps is as inevitable as it is desirable, …

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• Guru: I’m A Number, You’re A Number, Everybody’s A Number

  September 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  Do you, like Bob Seger, sometimes feel that you are nothing more than a number? Me too. That’s because to many people, that’s exactly what we are. And if there’s one thing that computers are good at, it’s assigning numbers — to orders, to accounts, to invoices, to transactions, and of course, to people. Since we have to make the computer assign numbers, we may as well learn the modern way to do it.

  In my earliest days of programming, I would store the last assigned of a series of numbers in a data file. (The S/34 and S/36 …

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• IBM And Inspur Power Systems Buck The Server Decline Trends

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the first time in 11 quarters – in other words, since the final quarter of 2016 – the server market contracted. And not just because the hyperscalers and cloud builders were cutting back on spending as they consumed the vast amount of compute capacity that they bought in 2018. Enterprises pulled back on spending, too, and every geographic region and every category of server had declines as well, many of these due to their own independent cycles and some due to macroeconomic effects.

  As we reported back in July, the Power Systems business grew 3 percent at constant …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 35

  September 9, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Good people of IBM i Land, in this latest edition of the IBM i PTF Guide you will see that there are new HIPERs and Security groups for all four of the operating system releases. If you are on V7R1, please read the HIPER cover letter – there are over 100 fixes that are not on the cume and lots of dependencies. Please read and heed! And note that the PTFs for vulnerabilities below are not in this new Security group!

  There is a new DB2 for IBM i group for version 7.2, and a new version of MGTools …

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