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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OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization
March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie
The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.
IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …
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Quantum Computing and IBM i
March 24, 2021 Alex Woodie
At first glance, IBM i servers and quantum computers appear to be worlds apart. But considering the rapid advance of quantum computing today and the midrange server’s place in a long line of advances in business computing, they may not be as far removed as one might think.
That’s the general conclusion one could draw from listening to Jack Woehr and Jesse Gorzinski discussing the topic of quantum computing during Woehr’s presentation, “From Hamilton to Hollerith: What’s the Use of Quantum Computers?” during last week’s IBM i Futures Conference, which was sponsored by COMMON.
In addition to writing IBM …
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RevSoft Leans On ‘Shadowing’ To Ensure Speedy Job Scheduler Failovers
March 24, 2021 Alex Woodie
There are several things that can prevent a high availability failover from executing quickly on an IBM i server, including data synchronization issues, communication failures, and other problems. With the “shadowing” feature in its job scheduler, RevSoft is determined that issues with synching job schedulers do not make that list.
Jobs demand special treatment in the IBM i high availability world. Care must be taken to ensure that active jobs, including jobs that are in the job queue as well as jobs that are scheduled to run in the job scheduler, are replicated from the primary server to the backup …
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As Data Security Deteriorates, Reconsider Your Exposure
March 22, 2021 Alex Woodie
The shift towards digitalization wrought by COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns has given new life to cybercriminals, who are exploiting the changes in computer access patterns to steal data and enrich themselves. For IBM i shops, the time to lock down vulnerable endpoints in the system-of-record was yesterday.
If you’re not feeling a sense of urgency about the data security situation, then you’re not paying attention. Since the start of the year, numerous reports from security professionals have alerted the IT community to new and evolved dangers that are lurking online.
Consider a report due this week from SlashNext Threat …
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Long-Term Impacts of COVID-19 Predicted for IBM i Shops
March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie
The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic lockdown will have a long-term impact on how IBM i shops operate, a panel of experts said during the IBM i Futures Conference yesterday. From being innovative and agile to the importance of security and disaster recovery, there are lessons to learn across the board.
It’s been exactly a year since governments around the world instituted severe lockdowns to, ostensibly, stop the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The lockdowns have come, gone, and come again in many parts of the world, injecting a level of uncertainty into our work lives …
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What’s In the Top 5 Hottest IBM i RFEs
March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie
The IBM i platform’s greatest strength is its committed user base, whose long-lasting loyalty is unique in the annals of the business computer industry. IBM encourages its committed customers to get involved with shaping the future of the platform through the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, which plays out in the public for all to see.
IBM’s RFE process also supports the ability for users to submit requests privately, and there are undoubtedly plenty of these requests made. Obviously, we have no insight into these private RFEs (although they would be fun to read). Among the public RFEs, there …
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SAP on IBM i to S/4 HANA Migration: ‘No Need to Rush’
March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie
Organizations that run SAP applications on IBM i servers have about nine more years of maintenance and support available from SAP, and should be in no rush to move to SAP’s preferred application environment, S/4 HANA, IBM SAP on IBM i expert Christian Bartels told the community last month. “There is still a lot of time to go, so there is no need to migrate right now,” he said in a webinar.
The SAP on IBM i community, which numbers around 1,500 or so organizations around the world, has expressed concern about SAP’s plan for the IBM i environment, particularly …
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What The Open Source Roadmap Holds For IBM i In 2021
March 15, 2021 Alex Woodie
2020 was whirlwind of a year when it comes to open source on IBM i, with many major new open source products coming to the platform. The roadmap for open source software in 2021 may not be quite as active as last year, but there will be some compelling new technology to play with, coming from IBM and the community, IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski tells us.
“Last year was a pretty big year for open source,” says Gorzinski, whose official IBM title is senior business architect for open source software on IBM i. “In 2021, we’re going to …
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Low-Code API Development Gets A Boost From Profound
March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie
Profound Logic last week launched Profound API, a new product designed to enable the development and management of RESTful Web services with a minimal amount of coding. The browser-based product works with IBM i programs and data, as well as assets located off the box, and is designed to enable even entry-level IT professionals to get into the API game.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been around for decades. Nearly every developer will call or expose an API at some point in their lives. But APIs have been gaining new momentum lately as a critical layer enabling the future of …
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Remain Buys MiWorkplace, Integrates It Into TD/OMS
March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie
In 2020, Remain Software quietly acquired MiWorkplace, a lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM i. Last month, the company announced that it has completed the integration of MiWorkplace into TD/OMS, its change management system for IBM i. It also rolled out new releases of TD/OMS, Remain API Studio, and Gravity.
MiWorkplace is a Java-based IDE out of Germany that’s been building a user base among the IBM i customer base for a few years. The software, which runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, was developed primarily to provide a better coding experience for SEU users, not as a …
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