• Cost, Simplicity Driving Cloud HA Adoption

  October 9, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In years past, the IBM i community has adopted high availability software at a slow but steady pace. But the cloud portion of this market is growing at a much faster rate, thanks to the lower costs and simpler setups that cloud-based high availability brings to customers.

  Penetration of high availability software into the IBM i market is likely to hit 50 percent this year for the first time ever. That forecast can reasonably be made by looking at HelpSystems‘ 2017 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which showed a 2 percent jump in HA usage from 2015 to 2016, …

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• TRs for IBM i 7.3 and 7.2: Enhancements, No Big Surprises

  October 4, 2017 Dan Burger

  With each Technology Refresh, we are reminded that the pace of enhancements IBM brings to its IBM i operating system and related software products is significant and that certain areas are more significant than others. So, the IBM i community is either aligned with these upgrades and eager to put them to use or it’s not yet ready, willing or able to be technologically current. As usual, there are IBM i shops watching as the enhancements unfold and making decisions on whether the enhancements can deliver benefits to their business in terms of productivity and solving business challenges.

  Steve Will, …

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• IBM Adds Support For Publishing JSON In DB2

  October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i shops will be able to publish JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents from their Db2 for i database. That much-desired capability will finally arrive as part of the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i versions 7.2 and 7.3, which were announced yesterday and ship this month. New SQL commands and security log enhancements round out the release.

  The capability to publish JSON documents has been a long time coming for IBM i shops, who until now have had to content themselves with the capability to consume and store JSON within their database, but who lacked …

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• IBM Patches 28 More Security Vulns In JDK

  October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM on Saturday released patches to fix 28 flaws in the Java Development Kit (JDK) that ships with the IBM i operating system. Almost all of the flaws originated in Oracle’s underlying Java Standard Edition (SE) kit, and many of them are considered very severe.

  Twenty-seven of the 28 flaws impact the IBM SDK Java Technology Edition software in all releases of IBM i, from version 6.1 to version 7.3, according to the September 28 security bulletin. The patches released by IBM fix the problems in all of these releases. While i5/OS V5R4 is likely impacted too, IBM will …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 4

  October 4, 2017 Dan Burger

  Prior to the latest Technology Refresh announcements, which were just released yesterday, Tim Rowe, business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i, reviewed what was added to Access Client Solutions earlier this year. He also commented on the partnership between IBM and HelpSystems that resulted in development work on several IBM products being farmed out to the IBM i software vendor.

  Inside Monitor this week, you’ll also find articles pertaining to open source database trends, what’s holding back IT hiring, Java technology on IBM i, and IBM’s leading role in Blockchain advancements. The calendar of events has …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 39

  October 3, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The big story this week is that there are issues with Java. It seems there are more than 25 CVEIDs out for Java. That is the sad news. The good news is that they are all covered by PTF’s available in the latest Java Groups:

  • Release 7.3 – SF99725 level 6
  • Release 7.2 – SF99716 level 14
  • Release 7.1 – SF99572 level 29
  • Release 6.1 – SF99562 level 40

  For complete details on the CVEIDs, check this link: Additional information about Java on IBM i can be found at this link here. Just a side note, IBM is …

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• Talking Power9 With IBM Fellow Brad McCredie

  October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power8 generation is at the very end of its life, and the Power9 generation is just starting to crawl and soon will be walking and then running. IBM is a bit behind its processor rollout cadence, but that delay is not as great as the one that Intel has experienced with its recent “Skylake” Xeon SP processor launch, which was expected last September and then was held off formally until July. We had heard Power9 iron would launch in July, then in October, and now we are hearing maybe in December.

  It is unusual for there not to be …

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• Why Encryption Is Not A Silver Bullet

  October 2, 2017 Alex Woodie

  While there is a temptation to view database encryption as the ultimate form of security, there are a variety reasons why the technology should not be relied upon as the main means to protect your valuable DB24i data. We talk with former IBMer Bruce Bading, who wrote the book on IBM i security assessments, to get the dirty details.

  In the wake of the Equifax hack, several important questions have gone unanswered: Did the credit giant encrypt its data, and if so, how did hackers end up with 143 million records? With multiple government investigations – and many more civil …

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• Guru: Consuming A REST Web Service Using SQL And POST

  October 2, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In my prior article, I showed how to consume a REST web service using the GET verb. This time, we’re going to continue to build our knowledge of web services by working with the POST verb. In addition to working with a different verb, I’m also going to demonstrate how to pass a header and body to the service.

  The goal is to post information to an Amazon Web Service (AWS). I created a simple REST Amazon Web Service that accepts information about a pet which will be inserted into a pet store database. I pass a JSON structure …

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• IBM i And RDi: Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

  October 2, 2017 Dan Burger

  Evaluating the future of your IBM i environment should be on your mind. It should be on the mind of your boss and the minds of everyone at the C-level where you work. Maintaining and modernizing existing applications means being prepared for today and tomorrow, even if that requires technological changes that test the outer limits of your comfort zone.

  The need to integrate technologies and reuse existing business logic may vary from foggy to laser sharp, but continuing to get more from IT is probably happening to some degree, or it soon enough will. Are you prepared to become …

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