• As I See It: Speech On Steroids

  November 11, 2019 Victor Rozek

  When Guttenberg first started cranking out Bibles, the religious authorities who dominated life and discourse in the 15th century were cautiously optimistic. Not only could it save monks years of lugubrious work copying and illustrating the volume, but they assumed this new technology would be used solely to propagate a Medieval version of approved speech.

  But of course that didn’t last long.

  Since its Feudal inception, communication technology and free speech have always had a turbulent and tenuous relationship. The easier it became to disseminate information, the more efficient the spread of heretical, seditious, and unpopular ideas. And the more …

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• Private Cloud Spending Steady, Public Cloud Declines

  November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is interesting to watch the progress of the transition from traditional bare metal machines running discrete workloads on separate systems to cloudy infrastructure that is virtualized and is therefore more malleable and also allows for the utilization to be driven up on systems.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the traditional, monolithic architecture is going away over the long term, but in the short term, cloudy infrastructure – at least determined by the amount of money that regular enterprises as well as the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and other service providers spend – rises and falls and is still …

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• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

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• PSPS: The Latest Threat To Business Continuity

  November 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Businesses in Northern California learned about a new threat to business continuity in October: the Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSPS. With weather conditions ripe for the rapid spread of wildfire, Pacific Gas and Electric de-energized thousands of miles of power lines, sending thousands of homes and businesses into disaster recovery mode.

  In late September, as weather conditions turned dry, hot, and windy, PG&E warned that it would have to cut power across large swaths of its Northern California service territory, potentially shutting off power to 2.4 million people. In the wake of power line-sparked wildfires that destroyed tens of …

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• The All-Knowing, Benevolent Dictator Of Code

  November 6, 2019 Sebastien Julliand

  Not every software project can have an all-knowing benevolent dictator looking through every line of code, and even all projects could have such a person to oversee the quality of the code, there is no reason to not automate as much of this very important code review job as is possible.

  Luckily for IBM i shops, there is such a tool to help with code review, and in that sense, we suppose, you can install rather than hire that all-knowing benevolent dictator of application code. It’s called, appropriately enough, CodeChecker, and it has been available from ARCAD Software for quite …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 6

  November 6, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  November is the month that reminds us to stop and think about the positive things in our lives and remember to be thankful for all those good things. In our personal lives, family and health are probably at the top of your list. At IT Jungle, our readers and advertisers are at the top of ours. We continue to be thankful for this platform and its ecosystem that gives us life, and to the people who read our articles every week who give us purpose. Now that we have shared our gratitude, we’d like to share the news of the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 44

  November 6, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Another week, another security vulnerability that is being addressed in the IBM i software stack. As you see in this week’s issue of the IBM i PTF Guide, IBM Navigator for i is affected by CVE-2019-4450. See this link for further details. This CVE can be remediated by applying the following HTTP Group PTF:

  • Release 7.4: SF99662 level 2
  • Release 7.3: SF99722 level 19
  • Release 7.2: SF99713 level 32

  Also, you will see that there is a new WAS 8.5 Group PTF for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3.

  As we have already reported in The Four …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

  This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …

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• Microsoft Elaborates On Its IBM i-Azure Strategy

  November 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft has launched various efforts over the years to entice IBM midrange users to adopt their products. The fledgling multi-user operating system, Windows NT, was the target of those first efforts, followed by ever-more-capable versions of Windows Server. Now the software giant is holding its Azure cloud as the destination for IBM i shops. The big question is: Will IBM i shops make the move?

  Last week, IT Jungle talked with Eric Lockard, the Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of Azure Dedicated, a department within Azure that focuses on hosting non-standard platforms in the cloud. The company has found …

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• The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A couple of weeks ago, buried in the October Power Systems announcements, we told you about the new NVM-Express flash cards that Big Blue brought to the Power iron and that are specifically enabled in the IBM i 7.4 release with Technology Refresh 1, or TR1. We didn’t have a lot of detail back then about the new drives other than some capacities and pricing, but we know more now and we are going to tell you what we know.

  We will circle back with Big Blue and have a discussion about what the addition of NVM-Express flash means – …

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