• TRs Deliver Database and SQL Updates for Every IBM i User

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to SQL services and database updates, there’s something for just about every IBM i user in 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. With dozens of new and enhanced database functions and SQL services, these TRs in fact may be the biggest releases ever, according to Scott Forstie, the Db2 for i architect at IBM.

  During a recent interview with IT Jungle about the new Watson geospatial capabilities that his team delivered in the database (which you can read about here), Forstie pondered the journey he and his team have been on, and how it’s culminated to this …

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• OpenSSL Flaw No ‘Heartbleed,’ But Other New Vulns Detected

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The cybersecurity world has been sitting on pins and needles for the past 48 hours, ever since news of a potentially devastating new flaw in OpenSSL started to leak out early Monday morning. That flaw turned out to be not as bad as initially feared, but that shouldn’t stop IBM i shops from patching other recent flaws, including some pretty serious ones in WebSphere Liberty, Java, the CCA, and Zlib.

  News started to emerge earlier this week of a critical OpenSSL flaw that required the utmost attention. The flaw could be a concern for just about everybody, including IBM, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 2

  November 2, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  Welcome to the beginning of the quick slide into the holidays! The end of the year will be here before we know it, but that doesn’t mean you should start slowing down. It is important to continue to be vigilant with your data security, as we see in some of our Top Stories of the week. If you’ve got items for the Calendar, please send them my way as we are always looking to fill out this resource for our readers. It’s definitely not too early to start planning your 2023 travel schedule, although many events continue to offer that …

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• The Numbers For Global IT Spending Are Up And To The Right

  November 2, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say how much is an increase in investment and how much is inflation, but the numbers for global IT spending are up and to the right, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. For those of you who gauge your spending against that of the rest of the world – and that should be all of you for various reasons – such spending forecasts are as important as they are malleable.

  It is hard enough to try to count all of the money changing hands around the world for hardware, software, and services relating to the …

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• What’s The Best Web Language For IBM i?

  October 31, 2022 Alex Woodie

  What’s the best language for developing Web applications on IBM i – Python, PHP, or Node.js? That’s the loaded question recently posed by Mike Pavlak, who has been sailing IBM i’s open source waters for nearly two decades. As Pavlak’s presentation at the recent COMMON NAViGATE conference showed, the answer might surprise you.

  Initially, Pavlak aimed to fight for Python in his “Web Language Shootout” session at COMMON’s NAViGATE conference, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri, last month, while his Perforce Software, colleague, Guido Faecke, argued for PHP and Liam Allan, who recently joined IBM, backed …

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• Flash Storage Is Table Stakes For Any IBM i Cloud

  October 31, 2022 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  After a long wait, the IBM i market is finally entering the true cloud era, one where utility pricing, performance, flexible capacity, and managed services are all available for companies running the IBM i operating system and RPG, Java, PHP, and sometimes COBOL applications against the Db2 for i relational database.

  But there are clouds, and then there are things that should not rightly be called a cloud.

  And we think that if you are a modern cloud, then your primary storage has to be flash and that there is no place for a hard disk drive based on spinning …

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• Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O

  October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.

  Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:

  “IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …

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• As I See It: Up The Downside

  October 31, 2022 Victor Rozek

  For all its transformational benefits, technology has an undeniable downside which regularly produces a range of disagreeable outcomes from annoyance to overt threat. As a subject, technological disfunction is a target-rich environment, but my word count limit – not to mention a reader’s attention span limits – prevent a full accounting. So, I’ve chosen three illustrative examples.

  On the annoying spectrum, is the near-complete destruction of customer service. These days, reaching an actual human being on the phone requires the patience of a monk and the persistence of a mosquito. No matter who you call, be advised their menu options …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 44

  October 31, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Remember all of those quiet weeks in PTF Land when nothing much was going on? There is a whole bunch of stuff this week.

  First, starting October 26, IBM has enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all its websites using IBMid. As a user on the Entitled Systems Support website, you are using IBMid to login, so you are impacted by the change. When you first login after the change is implemented, you will be asked to add an additional authentication method – either a code sent to your email or a supported mobile authenticator app available on Google Play Store …

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• Rocket Rides Modernization, DevOps for Hybrid Cloud Adoption

  October 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Puneet Kohli, Rocket Software’s new IBM i portfolio manager, is under no illusion about how easy it will be to boost IBM i software sales. “This is not a space where you wake up one morning and your CIO says ‘I’m going to go buy a product on the i,’” Kohli says. But a well-thought-out strategy around enabling DevOps and application modernization in a hybrid cloud setting? Now that just might move the needle.

  It’s been almost a year since Rocket Software founder Andy Youniss stepped down from the day-to-day management of the company he led for 31 years, paving …

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