Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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IBM i Delivers Sizable Benefits, Forrester Consulting Reports
June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops have firsthand knowledge of the positive characteristics of the platform relative to industry-standard X86 servers. We often hear anecdotes about the platform and share them with you through these pages. But IBM would like to get beyond mere anecdotes and get to some hard numbers on the IBM i advantage. That’s when it turns to Forrester Consulting.
According to Forrester Consulting’s latest Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, a typical IBM i customer can expect to save about $2.6 million over three years as a result of the IBM i platform’s uptime, productivity, and efficiency. The report, …
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SBOMs Will Come to IBM i, Eventually
June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie
The Biden Administration’s push to make software bills of material (SBOMs) mandatory may not be moving ahead as quickly as hoped. But the SBOM requirement is still marching ahead for federal agencies and the vendors who supply them with software – running on IBM i or any other platform – with a major self-attestation deadline.
The federal government’s SBOM push began back in 2018, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA), an agency within the Department of Commerce, spearheaded SBOM work with private-sector partners in an attempt to get better visibility into security vulnerabilities.
The SBOM movement got a …
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IBM i Backup Provider Storagepipe Snapped Up By Thrive
June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie
Storagepipe, a Toronto, Ontario-based provider of backup and recovery services for IBM i and other platforms, has been acquired by Thrive, a Massachusetts-based outsourcing company that provides a range of cloud-based IT services.
Storagepipe has been backing up IBM i servers since it was founded back in 2001. Back in 2015, the last time we checked in with them, the company was utilizing an appliance-based approach to backing up IBM i servers, and any other Windows or Linux servers that customers wanted backed up.
The backup would be pushed to the Storagepipe appliance, which would then replicate the backup off-site …
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Fortra Completes Postmortem Of GoAnywhere Vulnerability
June 5, 2023 Alex Woodie
Security firm Fortra recently published an analysis of the zero-day vulnerability that impacted its GoAnywhere MFT customers earlier this year and committed itself to “continuous improvement.” Meanwhile, an analysis shows that dozens of organizations continue to run unpatched and exposed versions of GoAnywhere months after the flaw was discovered and patches became available.
Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) first became aware of the remote code injection exploit vulnerability in its GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) product on January 30, as we previously reported, and quietly alerted customers on February 1. The company says it immediately shut down the hosted version of …
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Fortra Issues 20th State of IBM i Security Report
May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie
IBM is celebrating 35 years of its midrange platform next month, and there is no doubt it will be an exciting moment for the IBM i community. But there’s another occasion you might not be aware of: the 20th annual State of IBM i Security Study, which was issued last month by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems).
Back in 2004, the security experts at PowerTech took it upon themselves to analyze the configurations of customers’ actual iSeries and AS/400 servers (there were still AS/400s around) and write a report sharing what they found. As you might imagine, the state of security, as …
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FNTS Launches Managed Services for Power Servers in IBM Cloud
May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie
Have a Power server running in IBM Cloud but want someone else to provide the care and feeding? Then you might be interested in the new service unveiled by longtime IBM business partner FNTS to manage customers’ Power environments running in the IBM Cloud.
FNTS is an Omaha, Nebraska, outfit that has been sailing the IBM i and mainframe seas for many years. The company, which previously went by the name First National Technology Solutions, was the IT branch of a former bank, First National of Nebraska Inc., that was spun out to providing hosting services more than 25 years …
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Total LTO Shipped Capacity Up Slightly in 2022
May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie
More than 148 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity was shipped in 2022, a slight increase from the previous year, the LTO Program announced yesterday. The growth signals the continued relevancy of tape in a changing landscape marked by the predicted demise of spinning disk, the ubiquity of ransomware, and the continued growth of unstructured data.
Shipped LTO capacity reached a record high last year of 148.3 exabytes, a half-percent increase over 2021, according to the LTO Program, which is comprised of IBM, HPE, and Quantum. While unit shipments of tape cartridges declined slightly, capacity still grew thanks to more …
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Remain Launches AI Chatbot to Assist with Development on RDi
May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie
Developers who code in Eclipse-based environments such as Rational Developer for i (RDi) now have access to Ai Chat, a free ChatGPT-based chatbot launched last month by Remain Software. According to Remain CTO Wim Jongman, the coding copilot displays the programming chops of a seasoned RPG developer.
The AI revolution continues to unfold at an unprecedented clip, driven in large part by large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Facebook’s LLaMA, among others. Trained on massive corpuses of data culled from the Internet, these LLMs “learn” what words are likely to go with one another, …
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IBM Introduces watsonx for Governed Analytics, AI
May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie
At its annual Think conference last week, IBM took the wraps off watsonx, a new platform for crunching big data and developing AI and machine learning applications in a safe and governed environment.
You don’t need an industry analyst to tell you that artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the sun this year. Thanks to the public launch of ChatGPT in late last year, regular citizens (as opposed to AI experts and industry analyst) have become aware of the vast potential of large language models (LLMs) that can mimic humans in very convincing ways.
While LLMs like ChatGPT …
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Java 17 Now GA for IBM i and WebSphere Gets Company
May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie
Java 17 is now available on IBM i, IBM announced last month, bringing the first major Java enhancement since Java 11 to the platform. The Java-based Web application server environment is also evolving on IBM i, as Big Blue adds more options besides WebSphere.
The long-expected introduction of Java 17 on IBM i is finally here, and was delivered as part of the recent IBM Technology Refresh (TR) cycle, which brought us IBM i 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. IBM is now supporting the latest 64-bit Java development kit (JDK), dubbed IBM Technology for Java 17, with its 5770JV1 …
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