• The Low-Down On IBM’s Power Systems Sales

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Late last year, IBM, under the new regime of Arvind Krishna and in the wake of the acquisition of Red Hat and the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, reorganized its businesses and the financial reports it gives to Wall Street investors. Generally speaking, the way Big Blue is talking about itself, from a financial perspective, is more accurate than the reorganization it did after Ginny Rometty had been at the IBM helm for a bit. Which is good. But the one downside is that we lost visibility into the Power Systems platform.

  We lamented this when looking at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 10

  March 7, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  This week, there are a bunch of security bulletins about yet more new vulnerabilities, this time in the HTTP Server and the Samba Windows file server clone that are embedded in the IBM i operating system. There is also a partial mitigation against Log4j/Log4Shell vulnerabilities, and you may get a laugh or a cry out of this one. Maybe both. OK, probably both. Let’s go through them all.

  First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM HTTP Server (powered by Apache) for i is vulnerable to CVE-2021-44224, which you can read about here at this link. With this vulnerability, the Apache …

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• April Fools, Or Not: IBM Raises Power Systems Prices

  February 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an inflationary environment with all kinds of parts shortages, it is no surprise when IT suppliers raise their list prices and/or cut back on the depth of their discounts as they negotiate deals. We are certainly in that kind of environment, and we are also on the cusp of new Power10-based entry and midrange server announcements from IBM as well.

  Given all of this, we expected Big Blue to be announcing some price increases on older Power9 iron, which might be in short supply and therefore might be subject to “opportunistic pricing” as too much demand is chasing too …

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• Maxava Monitor Mi8 And The Cloud Fuels Expansion

  February 28, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Let’s face it – IBM i used to be an island. Set adrift from other platforms due to its loveable quirkiness and frequently managed by a separate team. It was often considered a real outlier. In recent years IBM has worked tirelessly to make IBM i running on Power Systems feel part of the mainstream server ensemble and is now thought by many as a normal server while managing to maintain what had previously made it unique.

  As a result, IBM i is now much more likely to be managed alongside other infrastructure than ever before. The green screen only …

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• Guru: Would You Rather See a Fire Marshal or a Fire Fighter?

  February 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  While there are similarities between the two, a fire marshal has a preventive role and focus on preventing fire, whereas a fire fighter has a reactive role and focuses on the putting out the smoldering ruins.

  When it comes to your firm’s cybersecurity practices, would you consider yourselves to be proactive or reactive (Fire Marshal or Fire Fighter)? The biggest difference between the two is your level of vulnerability when an attack does happen.

  There are ongoing practices that you can do to reduce your risk. One thing that we recommend is included in every proactive cybersecurity strategy is a …

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• As I See It: A Second Life

  February 28, 2022 Victor Rozek

  These days it’s not unusual for high school students to be computer savvy to a degree their parents could only dream of. But that wasn’t the case in 1972 when Jay Brandt attended high school.

  Oregon-based Benson Polytechnic High was conceived as a trade school, but over time adopted a pre-engineering curriculum. There, students could build a rudimentary foundation in a technology that would shortly transform the world. Jay quickly mastered the Four Horsemen of ancient IT: Basic, Fortran, COBOL, and Assembler; and when school broke for the summer, he had a novel idea.

  Although the high school had a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 9

  February 28, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, and we start off with this notice from the support people at IBM, which indicates that a HIPER PTF patch may include longer Abnormal IPL times during C9002C20 SNADS recovery. We also wanted to point out that we have added two new tabs to the Guide, QMGtools and ACS-Navigator for i. These are links we have found when troubleshooting and are useful for a more global look at those products.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published: …

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• IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.

  IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

  February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

  But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …

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• Love Your ERP or List It?

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to business applications, companies are strangely attached to them. According to a recent Forrester study, more than two-thirds of organizations are happy with a range of existing core business applications and don’t plan to leave them. But the upside of digital transformation beckons, leading the analyst group to wonder whether application owners are better off loving their ERP systems or leaving them.

  Forrester tackled the challenge of digital transformation in a creative way with a recent report, titled “On Premise ERP: Love It or List It,” which compares a company’s business application stay-or-go decision to the popular …

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