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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.

  • 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

    December 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

    It’s mid-December. and since nothing much else is going on, let’s take a quick waltz through the IT Jungle archives to see what kind of year it was. It all started back in January, when…

    Our esteemed founding editor tried to convince IBM what is plainly obvious: That the IBM i installed base is “still its very largest enterprise computing customer base” (emphasis added). Yes, there are more Red Hat licenses, but when it comes to unique companies, IBM i, with around 120,000 customers around the world, is still tops. Will IBM do the hard work to find a (virtualized) …

    Read more
  • Want to Modernize? Great! Now Get to Work

    December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Application modernization has been one of the more popular topics through the course of 2021. After the initial scare of COVID-19 wore off and the pandemic wore on, many companies came to the conclusion that older applications were hobbling their ability to compete in an increasingly digital world. While it’s clear the desire for modernization in the cloud is building, what’s unclear is the extent to which that will translate into action at IBM i shops.

    The COVID-19 pandemic and economic lockdowns rewarded two groups: companies that had largely digital business plans, and those who could run their applications in …

    Read more
  • Trinity Guard Update Brings Joy to System Values, SIEM Integration

    December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

    IBM i administrators who ever desired more control over their system value settings will appreciate the latest gift that Trinity Guard has placed under its customer’s midrange trees. The IBM i security software vendor now has a dashboard that automatically tracks all IBM i system values, even across multiple systems or LPARs. The company is also providing a bulk data transfer to SIEMs to stay on top of the work of naughty elves with TGSecurity Suite 2.4.

    The new system values module that Trinity Guard is shipping with the update to TGSecure (one of three products that make up the …

    Read more
  • IBM Updates CMOD for i

    December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that run Content Manager OnDemand for i now have the option of using several new “premium features” in non-production environments, IBM announced last week.

    CMOD is a scalable program that’s used by IBM i shops to capture, index, store, and distribute a large number of business documents, such as credit card statements, utility bills, explanation of benefits, check images, and trade confirmations. The software typically serves as a long-term archive for documents that in the past would have been handled with paper or microfiche.

    On Tuesday, IBM announced new features for CMOD for i 7.4. Specifically, IBM …

    Read more
  • AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?

    December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?

    AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …

    Read more
  • Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

    December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

    Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …

    Read more
  • IBM Encourages IAS and IWS Users to Move to Java 8

    December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

    IBM is now encouraging IBM i customers to move to Java 8 for their Integrated Web Application Server (IAS) and Integrated Web Services (IWS) environments. While the IAS and IWS environments can still run on older versions of Java, they are not fully supported by IBM, the company announced last month.

    IAS is a lightweight Java application server for IBM i that serves as a foundation for developing and running Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java servlet-based applications. It is based on WebSphere Application Server Liberty, the slimmed down and open version of the traditional IBM WebSphere environment. It has …

    Read more
  • HelpSystems Buys Another DLP Firm

    December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

    HelpSystems’ buying spree of security firms continued in late October when it acquired Digital Guardian, a provider of cloud-based data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. It’s the second DLP-related acquisition that HelpSystems has made in the past 24 months, and while it doesn’t appear to support IBM i directly, it will undoubtedly be sold into HelpSystems’ large IBM i customer base.

    Digital Guardian’s flagship product, the DG Data Protection Platform, is designed to prevent data from wandering off into the hands of insiders and external threats. The software, which runs on AWS, uses a combination of agents and sensors …

    Read more
  • New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

    November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

    IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …

    Read more
  • Security Threats, They Are a Changin’

    November 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Ransomware came into 2021 like a lion, but rather than going out like a lamb, it seemed to get bigger and meaner. Even IBM i shops, which so often are protected from the wider security storm, felt the panic and sense of helplessness of having their previous data held for ransom. But early indications are that the security threat we’re talking about this time next year may be entirely different.

    It’s tough to overestimate the impact that ransomware had on American businesses and other institutions through the course of the year. We had indications that something big was unfolding a …

    Read more

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