• Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

  As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …

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• IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.

  Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …

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• Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future.

  There are many …

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• Power Systems Bucks The IBM Trend And Grows

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems business continues to grow, and that is good news for all IBM i shops, particularly for those of us who actively want for there to be boisterous competition in server processors and systems architecture. It comes as no surprise that we think Big Blue still has much to offer when it comes to engineering systems that provide real differentiation in the market. The ongoing growth of Power Systems – maintaining the happiness of the substantial IBM i and AIX customer bases and expanding the Linux base – is what is required for IBM to continue to make …

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• IBM i 7.4 Rolled Out, And IBM i 7.3 Tech Refresh Rolled Up

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every couple of years, we get a new release of the IBM i operating system from Big Blue, and it has been quite a number of years since we have seen a new version of the platform. But that’s alright, since IBM has its Technology Refresh mechanism for adding support for new hardware and for adding significant new software function to the platform without breaking release-level compatibility and therefore requiring customers to requalify their applications, or worse yet, be forced to port their applications to an updated operating system.

  This new Technology Refresh approach has been a very good thing, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 16

  April 24, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Hopefully you got a little downtime over the holiday weekend, because there are more PTFs to deal with. But it is not too bad, so don’t panic.

  There are new HIPERs on all three currently supported releases – that’s IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3 – plus new Security groups on for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 as well as new MGTOOLS available for download for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3.

  New (Updated) Links this week:

  • Print: Information on Printers from Various Manufacturers
  • MGTools: MustGather: Instructions for Sending Data to IBM i

  …

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• Going Off IBM Hardware Maintenance A Risky Move

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are running older Power Systems servers have some tough decisions coming up. IBM ceased offering hardware support for Power 6 servers on March 31, and support for Power 7 will go away on September 30. Some organizations may choose to support themselves instead of upgrading to a newer machine, but that move comes with substantial risks.

  While there’s no central clearinghouse for this sort of information, it would appear that a good percentage of IBM i customers – if not most of them – have hardware and software support agreements with IBM. Big Blue provides three years …

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• IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

  “Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

  On …

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• Guru: Preamble Comments

  April 15, 2019 Chris Ringer

  Do you remember what you ate for lunch two days ago? If you’re like me, you had to think about it for a minute before answering. Now imagine trying to recall the detailed requirements of a few programs you wrote a year ago so you can modify them for a new project. Or better yet, what if someone else like a retired employee or a traveling contractor coded these programs? At this point you may become very dependent on any comments they left in the code.

  It’s been said that any time spent commenting on your code now might save …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 15

  April 15, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  If you are an IBM employee thinking of leaving your job, IBM probably knew about it before you did. Big Blue has been using AI as an employee retention tool and can predict with 95 percent accuracy which employees are likely to leave, CEO Ginni Rometty said in a recent interview. A little scary in the wrong hands, but if used effectively could mean a happier, more satisfied workforce, and cost savings in seeking and training new employees. You can see Rometty’s whole interview at the first link below, and then continue on to catch up on the rest of …

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