• Supply Chain Problems Cause Power Systems SAS Controller Shortage

  December 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic has been doing strange things to the world’s supply chains for nearly two years now, and all things considered, the Power Systems platform has been largely spared from any serious issues. Until now.

  We have just caught wind of a notice that Tech Data has sent out to all of its Power Systems business partners that IBM has plenty of SAS disk drives and SAS flash drives, but that “demand currently exceeds supply availability” for SAS controllers and SAS backplanes. The shortage just hit hard in the past week or so, and now orders that have SAS …

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• AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?

  December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?

  AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Time To Develop Your IBM i HA/DR Plan For 2022

  December 6, 2021 Josh Osborne

  Disasters and unplanned downtime can hit any company at any time – regardless of where its applications or data sits. Establishing a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) plan is paramount to getting your mission critical IBM i applications and your business back up and running – fast!

  2021 saw its fair share of challenges. Everything from bush fires to earthquakes to flash floods, and the continuation of the pandemic. And, those are just the ones mother nature sent our way. The manmade risks in the form of cyberattacks and ransomware also grew exponentially in 2021. With over 30,000 security …

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• Guru: RDi 9.6, Part 12 – New Features Targeting New RDi Users

  December 6, 2021 Susan Gantner

  In my previous tip about the latest release (9.6.0.11) of RDi, I promised to cover new features targeting easing the transition from PDM/SEU for new RDi users. If you’re an experienced RDi user, don’t tune out yet — you may find something of interest, too.

  I’ll discuss most of these features in the context of the PDM perspective. This is the perspective designed specifically to ease the transition to RDi. It was introduced originally back in 9.6.0.3 and I covered a little about it in a tip back then. While it was created to target new users, it seems …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 48

  December 6, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  It is a fairly light week for PTF patches for the IBM i platform, so we are going to go off the board a little bit here in the IBM i PTF Guide this week. Winter is coming and while plenty of us love this season, or all four of them, some of us are not happy when the snow flies.

  Well, after watching this video here, which you should do when you actually have 18 minutes and 49 seconds to really pay attention, you will never look at snowflakes quite the same way again. An amazing hobby from …

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• Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

  Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …

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• IBM Encourages IAS and IWS Users to Move to Java 8

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM is now encouraging IBM i customers to move to Java 8 for their Integrated Web Application Server (IAS) and Integrated Web Services (IWS) environments. While the IAS and IWS environments can still run on older versions of Java, they are not fully supported by IBM, the company announced last month.

  IAS is a lightweight Java application server for IBM i that serves as a foundation for developing and running Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java servlet-based applications. It is based on WebSphere Application Server Liberty, the slimmed down and open version of the traditional IBM WebSphere environment. It has …

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• HelpSystems Buys Another DLP Firm

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems’ buying spree of security firms continued in late October when it acquired Digital Guardian, a provider of cloud-based data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. It’s the second DLP-related acquisition that HelpSystems has made in the past 24 months, and while it doesn’t appear to support IBM i directly, it will undoubtedly be sold into HelpSystems’ large IBM i customer base.

  Digital Guardian’s flagship product, the DG Data Protection Platform, is designed to prevent data from wandering off into the hands of insiders and external threats. The software, which runs on AWS, uses a combination of agents and sensors …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 1

  December 1, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  The finish line is in sight for 2022 as we enter December. Hopefully you have successfully navigated all of the challenges that 2021 has brought and looking forward for the chance to restart in the New Year. As we get rolling again after the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., we catch up on IBM news post Kyndryl, and we found a few fun items for you to read as well. If you’re looking to do something charitable in the season of giving, the COMMON Education Foundation is seeking donations to help the next generation of IT pros. Find out more …

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