• Four Hundred Monitor, April 19

  April 19, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Almost everyone is worried about their pocketbooks these days. The flow of pandemic money has run dry, and individuals and businesses are navigating the way forward after some unprecedented circumstances. The first quarter ended for IBM on March 31, and there are lots of guesses floating around about the impending earnings report. We won’t know until we see the numbers, and it’s important to look as it will tell us a lot about what’s going on at Big Blue and the industry at large. Of course, you can count on the team here to crunch the details in the weeks …

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• The Downshifting Of IT Spending Growth Continues Apace

  April 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The central banks of the world don’t have a lot of levers to pull to change the behavior of the national and regional economies that they control. But when they raise interest rates, there is a predictable triple-whammy impact on the economy. Companies start cutting costs, including people, and those who don’t lose their jobs curtail spending just in case they might or in case the economy will slow, and the cost of borrowing money goes up and that dampens demand for big ticket items like houses and cars, which feeds back into the economy.

  And thus, it is no …

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• IT Modernization Goes Beyond The Apps, Kyndryl Says

  April 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When the word “modernization” is said in the midrange and mainframe circles, it usually means application modernization, or transforming your older RPG and COBOL applications to look and feel like they just came off the Java or C# assembly line. But there’s another view of modernization that encompasses more than just the apps, and according to a new report from Kyndryl, there’s quite a bit of work to do.

  While Kyndryl is certainly familiar with the application modernization needs of IBM i and System Z shops, the company (formerly IBM Global Technology Services) takes a broader view of the term, …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Why Modernizing IBM i Applications Is Important And Where to Start

  April 17, 2023 Pete Czornohus

  I always like starting with a quote: “Everybody seems to talk about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The funny thing is that it’s starting to feel like it relates to IBM i application modernization.

  Companies have talked about modernizing their RPG, COBOL, and CA 2E (SYNON) applications for decades, but a recent Fortra study said that 64 percent of IBM i shops are still considering IBM i modernization as one of their top five concerns. It’s worrisome that so many companies are considering it but not actively engaged in it.

  In this article, we are going to …

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• Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance

  April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.

  PerfScan is the first product – and …

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• As I See It: Greetings, Comrade IT Professional

  April 17, 2023 Victor Rozek

  During the Covid pandemic a phrase was popularized and became widely used as an acknowledgement and an expression of gratitude: Essential Workers. Nurses and doctors topped the list, but it soon expanded to include many occupations previously taken for granted: farm workers, truck drivers, supermarket employees, garbage collectors, and others who were finally receiving acknowledgement for just how essential their jobs actually were. Beyond their contributions to stabilizing a shaken nation, workers became “essential” simply by virtue of the fact that their jobs could not be performed from home.

  Which may be why IT professionals didn’t make the list. Regardless …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 16

  April 17, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  In a rare occurrence, there are no updates to the PTF Groups for the currently supported releases – IBM i 7.5, IBM i 7.4, and IBM i 7.3 – but there sure are a whole bunch of security vulnerabilities that IBM i shops have to deal with.

  First, there are two of them dealing with WebSphere Application Server Liberty. In PH50863:IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service, which you can find out more about here and which deals with CVE-2023-24998 CVSS 7.5. Then there is PH52739:IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a privilege …

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• Big Blue Refreshes The Technology for IBM i 7.4 And 7.5

  April 12, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, including version 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. These are relatively minor releases that bring incremental improvements to core areas of the platform, including IBM i Navigator, IWS, PowerHA, and RPG, among others. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the enhancements are undoubtedly just what many users need.

  We’re going to dive into each of the enhancements and do full coverage of them in the coming weeks here at IT Jungle. For today, we’re going to provide a broad overview of the new stuff that IBM just announced this …

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• Direct Attached Storage Gets Massive NVM-Express Expansion

  April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The storage area network – a giant wonking storage server with lots of lossless Fibre Channel switching between servers that share access to virtual storage partitions – has been around for several decades now. And despite all of the talk of its ubiquity, and usefulness in driving up storage utilization across a bunch of servers and therefore helping drive down the cost of that storage while also enhancing its manageability and shareability, for many IBM i shops, using directly attached storage is what they want to do.

  There are reasons for this, of course. In many cases, the IBM i …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 12

  April 12, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Artificial intelligence is not a new concept to our readership. But in recent weeks, we’ve seen a flurry of activity regarding AI, and frankly even we are a little worried. Imagine if some computer sucked up every article IT Jungle editor Tim Prickett Morgan ever wrote to create a digital TPM? It’s hard to believe even the most clever ChatGPT could do more than a weak imitation, but still a frightening thought that any of us might be so easily replaced. The Top Stories this week are heavily focused on AI, and we give you a sampling of what’s happening …

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