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  • Cybersecurity Is Hot, But Don’t Overlook Physical Security

    November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

    Cybersecurity played a major role in the run-up to yesterday’s presidential election, as Russian hackers leaked private communications and attempted to influence the outcome of the election. They weren’t successful, largely because elections remain mostly a manual affair in United States. But it did serve as a reminder of the need to protect critical American institutions in both the cyber and physical worlds.

    In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security identified 16 infrastructure sectors that are vital to the safety, security, and health of the United States and its people. You’ll find sectors you’d expect to find there,

    …

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  • Sundry Fall Power Systems Peripheral Enhancements

    November 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    We are still chewing through the October 11 Power Systems announcements, and this week we drill down into a variety of peripheral enhancements related to the IBM i platform. We may not have gotten new Power8+ processors for entry machines, and would have been expected sometime this year, but IBM is doing a bunch of things to make the existing Power8 machines more appealing and less costly to tide itself and its customers over until the Power9 processors ship sometime in the second half of next year.

    The midrange and high-end of the Power8 product line have already seen their

    …

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  • RPG Open Source Horse Pulls IBM i Community Plow

    November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

    The RPG development community is shrinking. I don’t mean because old programmers are riding into the sunset. I’m talking about collaboration and its ability to guide development that benefits the community by addressing the chAllanges of next generation applications for IBM midrange shops. Not that a collaborative open source culture is thriving here. But it could and it should. There are efforts to get this under way. And that will figuratively shrink the community.

    Tim Rowe, IBM i business architect for application development and systems management, supports the idea.

    “Why not have an RPG open source community? We have a

    …

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  • Imagine There’s No Spinning Disk (It’s Easy If You Try)

    November 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

    The odds of finding a hard disk drive in your next storage array grows slimmer by the day as the cost of solid state disks continues to drop. The price/performance curve for SSDs has improved so much relative to spinning disk, in fact, that decision makers in IBM‘s storage division see a day when data goes straight from flash to tape as it cools, or what they term “FLAPE.”

    “The 15K RPM drives are going away,” Gary Albert, business line executive for IBM Storage, tells IT Jungle. “There’s going to be one more generation [of 15K RPM drives],

    …

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  • The Hybrid Cloud Questions IBM i Shops Should Be Asking

    November 7, 2016 Lief Morin

    When companies speak with service providers about hybrid cloud technology, many of them want to know right off the bat how much money they can save. That’s the wrong question to ask. The first questions should be: What business challenges do we face? Can the cloud help to address these challenges? And to what extent should we be using the cloud?

    A transition to the cloud or a hybrid environment can provide companies with many benefits aside from cost savings, such as a broader set of services, a highly resilient architecture and the addition of a professional organization that manages

    …

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  • The New Tech Canoe: Paddle Less, Go Farther

    November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

    The unevenness of enterprise IT due to rapidly changing technology invariably puts pressure on companies unwilling or unable to invest in transforming their established core IT infrastructure consisting of primarily systems of record to a higher octane blend with greater emphasis on systems of engagement. Strategic reactions to this shift are happening throughout the IBM midrange, where the IBM i community–end users and software vendors–has a major presence and a conservative perspective.

    At the recent VAI Conference 2016, navigating transformation was the key ingredient in discussions around building efficiencies, reducing costs, increasing market share and resulting in profitability gains.

    …

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  • IBM’s Power Systems Stalls A Bit As Power8 Wanes

    October 31, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    With the Power9 chips slated for some time in the second half of next year, and the Power8 systems not being upgraded with a formal Power8+ variant, it is not surprise to us that sales of Power Systems iron based on the Power8 chip that launched in April 2014 are waning. It is the nature of every product cycle to have its ramp, its peak, and its slide. The slide is just a way to extract profits, with the ease of sales and improving yields on chips compensating for the fact that Big Blue has to discount more to move

    …

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  • VAI Pours Business Intelligence Into Midmarket ERP

    October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

    During the past several years, VAI has rerouted its ERP software roadmap with a modernization plan that included Web and mobile development, cloud-based managed services, and now business intelligence analytics. At the company’s user conference last week in New Orleans, it provided a peek at the BI component in S2K Version 6, which is in the hands of a few customers now and is expected to be generally available in Q1 2017.

    VAI’s S2K software is running core business applications in approximately 1,500 IBM midrange shops, primarily in the distribution, manufacturing, and retail industries. The privately owned and family operated

    …

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  • The Time And Tech Are Right For Online Backups

    October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

    Logically, tape backups shouldn’t be as popular as they are. The process is cumbersome and hardly aligned with the accelerating pace of IT capabilities and business decision making. When you factor in the recovery time for most companies that rely on tape, the logic becomes twisted. Even with automation, shorter backup windows, multi-platform complexity, and regulatory compliance combine to push the question of whether tape is reasonable, in spite of its widespread popularity.

    The online, service-based, backup alternative has been in place for almost 30 years with many improvements during that time. Internet connectivity, CPU capacity, data compression, encryption, and

    …

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  • As I See It: Paying To Play

    October 31, 2016 Victor Rozek

    It was Fitzgerald who is credited with making what is surely one of the more self-evident observations in history. Namely that “the rich are different from you and me.” To which Hemmingway supposedly replied, “yeah, they have more money.” It didn’t actually happen that way, but small matter. The exchange–more literary than conversational–stuck in the popular imagination.

    Different though they may be, the rich have the same essential needs as their less affluent brethren. Like the rest of us they crave connection, but that craving is informed by a fear of being taken advantage of. That, in brief, is the

    …

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