• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

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• The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

  This history continues, and is …

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• M81 Speeds Backups with Flash for i

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  M81, a French independent software vendor (ISV) that develops IBM i software, recently announced a new release of Flash for i, a utility that uses IBM FlashCopy and EMC SnapShot technology to clone an IBM i disk volume in just two minutes. With version 4.0 out the door and a new partnership with an American company, M81 is looking to expands its operations in the United States.

  Flash for i is an innovative utility designed to provide an IBM i-centric way to manage the FlashCopy and Snapshot commands that IBM and Dell EMC bring to the table with their enterprise …

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• Taking The Pulse Of The Used Server And Storage Market

  February 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who buy certified pre-owned vehicles know a secret that some of our peers in the datacenter also know about buying certified pre-owned servers and storage: You can get a lot better bang for the buck by staying one generation behind, and not really sacrifice much in the way of performance and features.

  And in the case of IT, unlike the situations with families buying vehicles, some customers have to stay two generations or more behind because of the limitations of their application software. And so they absolutely need to stay back on vintage iron. Even then, there …

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• SoftLanding Adds Support for Source Stream Files

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops developing in a mix of open source and native languages can now manage all of their development projects together in a new release of SoftLanding Systems’ TURNOVER software. The big change that enables that open source support is how SoftLanding adapted its change management software to support stream files on the IFS. The company also took the opportunity to add a new Web interface and rebrand its entire TURNOVER suite of products.

  First, let’s clear up the name changes. TURNOVER Lifecycle Manager is the new name of the change management software that used to go by TURNOVER …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 3

  February 3, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Yesterday, everyone’s favorite soothsayer Punxsutawney Phil predicted winter will hang on for six more weeks, which can be good or bad news depending on your weather preferences. What a difference a year has made as we close in on the one-year mark of when Covid-19 changed the world. Even Phil has had to adjust. The yearly Groundhog Day ritual, which dates back to 1887, was held virtually in 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, we’ve all learned to adjust evidenced by our Calendar below, which is filled with webinars and virtual events. COMMON also has a new hybrid conference …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 5

  February 3, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  When you watch PTF patches as part of making your living, you notice patterns. This week, the IBM i PTF Guide is a bit strange, or rather, IBM’s pattern of PTF updates is. Normally, when a PTF group is updated on one release, that same group is updated on the other two releases. This week, it is different. IBM i 7.4 has more groups changed than IBM i 7.3, and weirdly IBM i 7.3 has more groups changed than IBM i 7.2. It’s . . . just a little odd.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i …

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• IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.

  As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …

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• COVID-19: A Great Time for Application Modernization

  February 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  If your IT department has been waiting for the right time to start your digital transformation, then you’re in luck: With hundreds of millions of folks around the world stuck in their homes and largely limited to interacting via the Internet, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic lockdown represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build new digital channels to reach them.

  COVID-19 is taking a brutal toll on our country in terms of lost lives and lost livelihoods. There’s no upside to that, no way to spin that into a positive. But for IBM i shops that, for whatever reason, have resisted …

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• Guru: A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters, Take Two

  February 1, 2021 Ted Holt

  A strange thing happened to me recently. I was writing a new program and like a good programmer, was not reinventing the wheel. I was calling a utility program that calculated the values I needed. However, this utility program, which had always worked correctly, was giving me invalid data. How is it possible that a program can work properly for a long time and suddenly go bad?

  The answer to this question was ably answered by Rick Cook, who wrote “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying …

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