• Four Things That IBM i Shops Get Wrong About HA, DR, And Data

  July 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s always a little hard to generalize, but IBM i shops tend to be conservative, thoughtful, and thorough when it comes to running IT. But no IT organization is perfect, and there are still issues when it comes to disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA).

  We think this is more often a reflection of the situation than it is of the people running IBM i systems. And to get a sense of the HA and DR missteps that people are making, we had a chat with Lilac Schoenbeck, Vice President of go-to-market strategy in the Power Systems division at …

  Read more

• Cobalt Iron Supports Multiple LPARs with VTL

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops will be able to back up multiple LPARs to an individual virtual tape library (VTL) from Cobalt Iron, the company announced recently. The new capability overcomes a limitation that has existed since the company started to support IBM i with its data protection service a couple of years ago.

  Cobalt Iron is a Lawrence, Kansas-based provider of enterprise data protection services. The company’s flagship offering, called Compass, provides backup, recovery, and related services for or all major computer platforms, including servers running on-prem, virtualized environments, and systems and applications running in clouds.

  Some of Cobalt Iron’s customers …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, July 22

  July 22, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The struggle to find our way back to some form of normalcy is real. And it seems some of us are ahead of others. Here in Southern California, we have entered our second quarantine as many business have once again been shuttered. But other states are having more success so perhaps better times are ahead for all of us. At IT Jungle, the benefit of online publishing is our work lives have not missed a beat, like many of you in our shared industry, even as our home lives became more complicated with kids home from school and quarantine. Our …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 29

  July 22, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  OK, last week I said that the action never stops here at the IBM i PTF Guide. But it does slow down and it does get very much focused from time to time. And it is no surprise when things slow down during July and August. Even with the coronavirus pandemic adversely affecting all of our lives and loves, people are taking a little downtime from living at work – no, we are not working from home. It is the other way around, clearly. And most of us are living in a restaurant and many of us are living …

  Read more

• The Battle Of The Single-Core IBM i Machines

  July 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM announced a revamped lineup of entry Power9 systems, including a new single-core variant of the Power S922 server aimed at IBM i shops that will replace the long-running Power S812 and the Power S914 for IBM i customers with modest compute performance and storage requirements. The announcement of the single-core Power S922 comes just as the stay of execution for the Power S812 will be running out on August 31.

  In the issue last week, we told you that we didn’t have a lot of the details on the pricing of the new single-core Power …

  Read more

• ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

  July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

  While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

  Read more

• Guru: Dynamic Arrays Come To RPG

  July 20, 2020 Jon Paris

  Some 12 months ago, when the 7.4 release was announced, I wrote the Guru Tip “7.4 Brings New RPG Goodies” describing the features of 7.4 that were also available on 7.3. I said at the time that I would return later to discuss the 7.4-only features. So now that a significant number of shops have access to 7.4 that time has arrived.

  Dynamic arrays are the answer to the perennial programmer question: “Just how big do I need to make this array?” In my experience it doesn’t actually matter how big you make it, at some point down the road …

  Read more

• Unperspective: I Am Weird, You Are Weird

  July 20, 2020 Trevor Perry

  People are weird. All of them. You are weird. I am weird.

  I believe in this so much that in my past I started a company with P.A.W. in its name. The fact is, it’s true, but not quite how you think.

  The Webster’s Dictionary definition of “weird” is short, including “of strange or extraordinary character: odd, fantastic.” Odd is defined as “differing markedly from the usual, ordinary, or accepted” and “not regular, expected, or planned.” Fantastic is defined as “so extreme as to challenge belief.”

  Taking a different look at weird, it’s easy to see where we have been …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 28

  July 20, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  The action never stops here at the IBM i PTF Guide. Which is probably a good thing because if a platform isn’t being constantly updated, expanded, tweaked, and fixed, then it probably is not going to live for much longer in this fast-changing world. No one can say that about the IBM i platform. Nope.

  So for you security buffs, check this out. Security Bulletin: BIND for IBM i is affected by CVE-2020-8616 and CVE-2020-8617, which has an insanely long link buried here. The link above provides details, but the gist of it is also here by release: …

  Read more

• IBM Revamps Entry Power Servers With Expanded I/O, Utility Pricing

  July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Believe it or not, but it has been two and a half years since the first Power9 server shipped and it has been more than two years since the entry Power Systems machines – that would be the Power S914, the Power S922, and the Power S924 machines, code-named “ZZ” after the country-rock-blues band from Houston – were first announced. And today, these machines are getting an I/O makeover.

  And specially for IBM i shops, IBM is rolling out a single-core version of the Power S922 that will offer better bang for the buck as well as lower acquisition cost …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles