• As I See It: Spacing Out

  September 8, 2025 Victor Rozek

  Computer rooms have always been somewhat problematic to build and maintain: Raised floors, 24/7 air conditioning, a reliable power supply, and, for larger installations, a backup power source. These requirements were spendy but manageable at least until the rise of AI. To put it bluntly, AI is a resource hog, addicted to excess. Its drugs of choice are land and energy.

  The future of datacenters is unfolding in Abilene, Texas. There, Project Stargate is under construction, and the mega-scale OpenAI datacenter can hardly be called affordable. Its estimated cost is $500 billion. The facility includes a whopping eight million square …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 34, 35, And 36

  September 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are determined to get back in synch with the publication schedule of The Four Hundred and the IBM i PTF Guide, so this week you get three issues of the latter inside of one issue of the former, a necessity because PTFs never rest even if publications do take a breather every once in a while.

  In Number 34, this was the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level we did on August 23:

  PTF Groups 7.6:

  • HIPERs – High Impact Pervasive
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Group Security

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs

  …

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• The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of

  August 25, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.

  This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …

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• Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

  August 25, 2025 Ash Giddings

  When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

  It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

  According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past …

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• Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

  ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

  IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

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• New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

  The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 33

  August 25, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It might be a good and convenient thing that the WebSphere Application Server, the Web server embedded in the IBM i platform two and a half decades ago and making it part of the Internet, is based on the open source Apache Web server. But it sure does have a lot of patches. The good news is that because it is open source, it is patched regularly and problems do not fester in obscurity.

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there are a slew of security vulnerabilities related to WebSphere, as there sometimes is. Let’s walk through them all. …

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• Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.

  Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration …

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• IBM To Add Full System Replication And FlashCopy To PowerHA

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM will be adding a pair of new technologies to PowerHA SystemMirror in the near future, including Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC). The technologies are currently offered through the PowerHA Tools group of products via IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services), but will become part of the mainstream PowerHA offering soon.

  FSR and FSFC have been available for years via IBM Expert Labs toolkits, where they have provided IBM i shops with additional forms of data and application protection above and beyond what they get with BRMS and PowerHA, both of which are still required with …

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• Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

  August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

  A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

  Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.

  01 **Free
  02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');
  
  03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
  05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);
  
  07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
  08 string_UTF8 = 

  …

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