Timothy Prickett Morgan
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OK, This Really Is The Last Of Power Systems Announcements For 2022
December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are winding down for 2022, and you are very likely doing the same. There are a few more things we need to go over to close out the year.
In announcement 122-127, from December 13, IBM has announced that its IBM i subscription offering, which is paired with the subscription-priced Power S1014 that was hinted at during the July announcements and fully fleshed out in September.
With the changes, IBM is delivering three year and five year terms for initial subscription contracts, complementing the one year and four year contracts that were initially available. These three-year and five-year …
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Happy Holidays To All Of You From All Of Us
December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After two years in pandemic-induced isolation, things got back to something close to normal in 2022. Which was a relief as well as a bit exasperating. It is hard to know what to trust as any trend anymore.
For my family, which got whacked by “Delta” SAR-CoV-2 back in December 2019 after I took the three older kids to Chinatown in New York City for the holidays, we managed to avoid it since lock down in March 2020. But just before traveling to see family on Thanksgiving, where we have several immunocompromised relatives, we got the “Omicron” variant and had …
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The Steady Growth Of The Low Code Movement
December 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With IT talent in short supply and expensive as too much demand chases too little supply – a hard concept to get your brains around with over 42 million software developers working around the world creating and maintaining software that has an economic value in excess of $1 trillion a year – it is no surprise that some are looking to low code tools to help automate some aspects of their business.
Low code is not just happening in the datacenters of small and medium businesses writing new applications to take on new problems and add new functionality to systems. …
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A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements
December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.
First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …
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Surprise! There’s a Tech Refresh 13 For IBM i 7.3
December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, we bet you were not expecting that. Or, based on past history, maybe you were. But when IBM put out the two Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 last Friday on December 2 as planned – that would be TR1 for the latter and TR7 for the former – the company also sneaked out an unofficial TR13 update to IBM i 7.3. With this Tech Refresh, IBM i 7.3 has many of the same updates that came to the two more current releases of IBM i.
If you look at the IBM i Technology …
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SOAP Web Services Fail After WebSphere Liberty Patched
December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you had not yet gotten around to putting the October 2022 HTTP Group PTF patches for the WebSphere Liberty web application server on your IBM i system, that may turn out to be a fortunate thing. There is something wonky about SOAP web services running in conjunction with Integrated Web Services (IWS v2.6) and Integrated Application Server (IAS v8.5) middleware on the IBM i platform that is causing SOAP fault errors.
This error is documented here by IBM, and the techies that we know are trying to figure out the full extent of the issue. Doug Bidwell, our …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 48
December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
To start right off, there is a security vulnerability in the Hardware Management Console, so those of you who have larger Power Systems that have their logical partitions managed by this out-of-band controller had better listen up. Specifically, check out Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Bind (CVE-2021-25219) affects Power HMC, which you can read about more here.
The fixes for this security vulnerability are as follows:
Product VRMF APAR Remediation/Fix Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 ppc MB04373 MH01944 Power HMC V9.2.950.0 SP3 x86 MB04372 MH01943 Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 ppc MB04363 MF70302 Power HMC V10.1.1020.0 SP1 x86 MB04362 MF70301
As we …
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IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward
November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan.
Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle …
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IBM To Stop Unencrypted Fix Downloads In February
November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have caught word from the IBM business partner community that starting on February 15, 2023, Big Blue will stop allowing customers to get operating system software patches that are not encrypted.
The notification, which you can see here, was sent to business partners on November 23, just before the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. Various IBM support methods, including IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD), IBM Electronic Customer Care (ECC), and IBM Fix Central are all affected by this change.
“Many leaders of the internet industry – such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task …
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IBM Sets Maintenance Withdrawal On Power8 Iron For 2024
November 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All good things come to an end, and so it is with the Power8-based Power Systems machines. With the Power10 machines in full swing, it is no surprise that IBM is getting set to completely wind down its sales and support of these vintage Power8 systems. Sales have been winding down for the past year, and now Big Blue is warning that maintenance services will expire in 2024.
Rather than set a single date for all machines to have their maintenance agreements and support expire all at once, IBM has three different dates on which maintenance will come to an …
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