It is officially the autumn now, and that usually means Power Systems hardware and software announcements from IBM. IBM is not going to refresh its commercial Power Systems line with Power8+ processors this year, as it might have done with the strategy from years past, but as we pointed out a few weeks ago, there is a Power8 chip with integrated NVLink ports aimed at hybrid supercomputers.

An aside: Europeans say “autumn” because it sounds less severe that “fall,” a reference to deciduous forests losing their leaves I presume, but autumn only came into English usage from Latin by

Last month, at the Edge conference in Las Vegas, IBM rolled out a new subset of the Power Systems line aimed at midrange and large enterprises that want to build private clouds. In the past, IBM’s cloud efforts have been centered around its low-end Power machinery, with one or two sockets, with the assumption that companies want to build Power clouds that look like distributed, virtual, and orchestrated systems based on Intel Xeon E5 processors.

This is not necessarily a valid assumption.

A cloud is about orchestration and automation, not about a particular form factor and NUMA scalability of a

How far can really old, monolithic RPG code be extended? Some might say the end is in sight. Others might say if it ain’t broke, why fix it. It’s an application modernization dilemma. How much time is being devoted to application maintenance? Is the code worth saving as is, can it be modified as the basis of a modernization effort, or is it time for a total rewrite? These questions are on the minds of IBM midrange shops.

There are a variety of software vendors in the application modernization business with technology and products designed to help companies make decisions

IBM i shops that use the OpenSSL encryption protocol will want to know that IBM last week issued program temporary fixes (PTFs) for 14 security vulnerabilities impacting IBM i versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. If you’re running an older version of the IBM i OS, you are out of luck.

Like most modern operating systems, IBM i includes a range of open source components. That includes OpenSSL, which is an open source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) wire encryption protocols that’s managed by the OpenSSL Project.

As we learned following the big

In just a few weeks, the COMMON user group has two conferences offering IBM i education. It’s good to know there are still companies and individuals that value the development of IT expertise, innovation, and industry best practices. The evolution of IBM i skills has never been more important than it is today, but overall the attendance at technical conferences has remained at about the same level for the past five years.

COMMON has its Fall Conference scheduled for October 24-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and BeNeLux Power 2016–hosted by COMMON organizations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is set for