• 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

  …

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• 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

  …

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• 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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