Alex Woodie
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All Signs Point To The Cloud, But Will IBM i Crowd Follow?
February 15, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreYou don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.
There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners.
A January study of
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Where’s MKS Implementer? Alive and Well At PTC
February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIt’s been years since we could talk about the Big Three of IBM i change management system vendors. Aldon, SoftLanding, and Mortice Kearns Systems have all been gobbled up by bigger software houses whose core business models, alas, do not revolve around the IBM i. And while IT Jungle has kept up with the first two, we haven’t delivered any insight on the MKS Implementer product that Parametric Technology Corp acquired several years ago–until now.
PTC bought MKS in 2011 for $295.5 million (Canadian). As a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software, Massachusetts-based PTC is a much larger company,
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IBM Patches OpenSSH Security Flaws That Impact IBM i
February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM last week patched another pair of security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSH client for IBM i. The security flaws, which impact all current releases of IBM i–and very likely older releases that are no longer under maintenance–carry a moderate to severe risk, and could be used to execute arbitrary code on an IBM i server, obtain private cryptographic security keys, or execute a denial of service attack, IBM says.
On February 1, IBM issued a security bulletin to address the two flaws in its OpenSSH implementation for IBM i. Both flaws stem from a poor design in the OpenSSH client
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Scared of Tests? MIMIX Has You Covered with ‘Virtual Switch’ Feature
February 1, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreNearly one in five high availability users never test their HA setup, while more than 40 percent aren’t sure whether it will work, according to the 2016 State of Resilience report from Vision Solutions. The “set it and forget” mentality has plagued the HA industry for years, but it’s something Vision is now addressing with the new “virtual switch” capability in the latest release of MIMIX Availability.
Vision surveyed more than 2,600 IT professionals in late 2015 regarding the state of their data resilience strategies, and compiled the results into a 60-page report that it released last week (get
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What To Do With All Those Spare CPWs
January 25, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIf there’s one thing that the average IBM i shop with a typical business forecast doesn’t need, it’s more CPW. The latest generation of Power8 servers offer more than enough computational oomph to get the job done, which raises the question: What should one do with those spare CPWs? With some forward thinking, the average IBM i shop maybe doesn’t have to be so average anymore.
There is no doubt there’s a power glut of Power8 iron in IBM‘s IBM i market. Each Power8 chip has roughly 50 percent more computational power per core than the Power7 chip launched
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Carbonite Nabs EVault to Build One-Stop DR Shop for SMB Masses
January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreCarbonite is buying the EVault data protection business from Seagate for $14 million in cash, the companies announced last month. While the deal marks a nearly 10x decline in valuation for EVault, the folks at Carbonite are clearly happy to get their hands on EVault’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) business, which it sees pairing up nicely with its existing products for small businesses and consumers.
EVault began developing its online data protection business way back at the dawn of the commercial Internet in 1997. By backing up its clients’ data over the Web to centrally located servers, the
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Micro Focus Debuting Native 5250 Emulator for iOS
January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIT pros who want to access an IBM i server directly from their iPad or iPhone will soon have another way to do that thanks to Micro Focus, which is rolling out a new 5250 emulator that runs natively on iOS devices. The new product, which IT Jungle has learned will be called Reflection for TN3270 and TN5250, will be available soon from the Apple App Store for less than $50 per device.
Micro Focus is arguably the largest provider of terminal emulation software outside of IBM itself. The company acquired NetManage and its popular RUMBA (nee, Rumba) product
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Round Three of IBM i Predictions for 2016
January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe one constant in this universe is change, and the IBM i business is no different. The server platform is now in its fourth decade of service, counting go back to the System/3 days, and the pace of technological change in the business IT sector demands agility at many levels. In our third and final installment of our annual IBM i predictions, we have predictions from five IBM i pros about the changes we can expect this year.
Bob Langieri director of IT recruiting at Excel Technical Services
“I continue to see a slow but demeaning departure of some longtime
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Object Replication at the Touch of a Button
January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i professionals who struggle to distribute objects across multiple IBM i systems for patching, testing, or other purposes may be interested in a new product from Shield Advanced Solutions. The software, dubbed RE4i, can automatically distribute practically any type of IBM i object to one or more remote systems with the press of a button, thereby saving time and reducing hassle for programmers and administrators alike.
Most midrange administrators use a combination of FTP and save/restore commands to distribute and apply objects–such as PTFs or application changes–to remote IBM i servers. The admins probably don’t view the manual
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IBM Debuts Another Solution Edition for SAP HANA on Power . . . Auto-Approval Brings Time Savings to Document Workflows . . . User-Defined Dashboards Get Power Boost from mrc . . .
January 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
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IBM Debuts Another Solution Edition for SAP HANA on Power
IBM is now shipping a third version of its Power Systems Virtual Solution Edition for SAP HANA. Last week’s announcement of a new solution edition based on its Power E880 server should give larger customers more options for running the in-memory database on IBM gear.
For the low low price of $177,357, customers can get started in a nicely equipped Power Systems Virtual Solution Edition for SAP HANA that features a 40-core Power8 processor module running at 4.19 GHz and 2 TB of RAM, along with Power IFL and SuSE