• Logical Replication: Still the Mainstay for IBM i HA

  July 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  For many years, logical replication solutions were the only choice in the high availability product category for IBM i and its predecessor platforms. IBM’s introduction of PowerHA changed that, providing a dramatically different approach to achieving high availability. However, the vast majority of HA deployments in the IBM i market still use logical replication solutions. Which one is best suited for your needs? Hopefully this story will help you find the answer.

  Logical replication solutions work by replicating changes made to database files and other IBM i objects in real time. The eight third-party products in this category – including …

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• Have You Patched Those 35 Java Vulns on IBM i?

  July 19, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that take security seriously will want to know that IBM has issued a number of security patches over the past several months. The patch count since March includes fixes for security vulnerabilities in various technologies supported in IBM i 6.1 through 7.3, including 35 alone in Java, as well as flaws in Python, Samba, BIND, and the integrated Web server.

  Implementing security patches, or program temporary fixes (PTFs) in IBM jargon, is one of the easiest ways to ensure your system is kept up-to-date against vulnerabilities that are constantly being exposed by the hacker community. It’s also …

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• Eamon Musallam: Insights on i

  July 19, 2017 Dan Burger

  Things that make a difference. We’re all looking for what’s essential. Too often we get distracted by the inconsequential, improbable, and inapplicable. Sometimes those distractions are built into the way we’ve always done things. The fate of organizations, the fate of our professions and the fate of IBM i are in the balance.

  Last week, I had a conversation with Eamon Musallam, president of the OCEAN user group, which is based in Orange County, California. We talked about real work that is getting done by IBM i shops to solve problems and how a user group continues to be …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 19

  July 19, 2017 Dan Burger

  The graying of the IBM i workforce is opening the door for somewhat of a youth movement. Yes, that has the potential to be culturally shocking. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some youthful influence is needed in organizations (yours might be one of them) that have done little to change the IT formula in the past 20 years or more.

  This week Monitor also includes articles on what’s tormenting IBM’s cognitive superhero Watson, a blockchain blockbuster deal for IBM, and an interview with the RDi chief architect and his insights into what RDi can do for you.

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 28

  July 19, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Firmware. That “stuff” in the middle that appeared in our world when the AS400 went away. In the beginning, when the computing world was created and this unique creation was created to be something special, there was an AS/400.

  This was an all-in-one OS/TIMI/hardware computing solution. During its evolution, names have changed, compute, memory, storage, and I/O capacity has increased exponentially, and, several architectural changes have been made. Some changes have been comfortable, some not so much. One of the not-so-comfortable things is firmware. This firmware has been around forever, we just didn’t know it as a separate beast to …

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• Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.

  The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has …

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• Of Course i’s Not The AS/400

  July 17, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The AS/400 was a great computer. No doubt about that. In the pantheon of business machines, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that remotely compares to IBM’s long-lived midrange champion. But today’s IBM i on Power Systems platform has evolved far beyond the AS/400, and midrange professionals who cling to the old words and ways are doing us all a disservice. Are you one of them?

  Chances are, you’re not. If you’re reading this article, you’re likely one of the “engaged” midrange professionals who takes an active interest in news, works to improve your skills, and embraces newer technologies available …

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• Guru: Conditional SQL Unions

  July 17, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL unions combine two or more result sets into one. That’s what they were designed to do. But unions also provide a way to choose between alternate result sets, i.e. to enable or disable SELECT statements at run time. I have used this feature to advantage on numerous occasions. Here’s how it’s done.

  First consider the nature of unions. Each result set of a union can return data or no data, depending on the criteria in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. If a SELECT retrieves no data, the system appends an empty set to the union result. The way to …

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• IBM i Security Expert Interprets PCI and Multi-Factor Authentication

  July 17, 2017 Dan Burger

  With data security written boldly at the top of many organizations’ priority lists, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is viewed as a top line defense against data breaches. Whether a company handles credit cards and is required to implement mandated security measures or uses the PCI standard as a best practices model, IT security gurus pay attention to the PCI DSS.

  We are well beyond the realization that organizations need to be secure. The emphasis has clearly shifted to how organizations become secure. How to build and maintain a secure network, protect data and regularly monitor …

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• Mixed Results For IT Spending Forecasts

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have made it through the first half of 2017, and now is a good time to take a pause and count the money that the IT vendors of the world have amassed from the hardware, software, and services they provide to the datacenters of the world. And so, IDC and Gartner have done just that even ahead of the reporting of financial results for the second quarter. The results from these two firms generally agree, and they show that, as always, different parts of the business are growing even as other parts slow or even shrink.

  One big reason …

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