• Mad Dog 21/21: Where Icarus Is Bliss

  November 26, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  IBM got a lot of public attention in 2011 when its Watson system beat two outstanding human competitors at the widely televised quiz game Jeopardy. Since then IBM’s revenue has declined by about 25 percent and its profits have fallen even more dramatically, although intake did improve during three of the most recent four quarters. Regardless, IBM’s Watson project didn’t translate into a big boost to its financial returns, neither in new activities nor by reinvigorating legacy businesses. Seven years after the event, the company’s Jeopardy coup, however memorable, has failed to add significant value. What went wrong?

  IBM …

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• Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

  November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.

  They have no choice, living in the future as we do.

  The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …

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• Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

  Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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• Data Needs To Be Anonymized For Dev And Test

  November 14, 2018 Scott Heinlein

  (Sponsored Content) Every company needs to create applications and then test those applications against a database that has real data in it. And therefore, most companies will take their test data from production databases and make a copy of it, or a subset of it, to do such testing, usually by doing a bulk copy. And at that moment, all of the sensitive data in that database is exposed to the programmers and testers.

  Given that in excess of 80 percent of information leaks start from an internal source, this is a potential – and possibly great – …

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• HelpSystems Gets Into JAMS for Scheduling

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems yesterday announced the acquisition of MVP Systems Software, the Connecticut-based developer of the JAMS workload management and scheduling software. While JAMS supported IBM i, HelpSystems will count on the product to deliver capabilities primarily in the open systems realm, with cloud possibilities looming in the future.

  The acquisition came together as the result of mutual respect that HelpSystems and MVP Systems Software had for each other, says Kate Bolseth, general manager of cross platform products at HelpSystems.

  “We’ve known each other for years in the workload automation space and I’d say that we’ve both been very impressed with one …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 14

  November 14, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  I learned a valuable lesson this week: never stick your hand in the middle of a dog fight. Now, that may seem like common sense, but sometimes in that moment of panic when you’re trying to figure out what to do, you do something dumb. But it got me thinking about the efforts of our community who look to help each other out whether it be through a free webinar, a virtual training, or a product so our readers will know exactly what to do – or not to do — if disaster strikes. IT Jungle also plays a vital …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 45

  November 14, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are winding down to the final seven weeks of the year, which means that we have just seven PTF guides to go in 2018! That being said, news on the PTF front continues to be sparse. Case in point, another week of no new defectives. Of course, you never know what next week will bring, but in the meantime, let’s look at what did happen this week. We got a new security bulletin and learned that IBM i is affected by networking BIND vulnerability CVE-2018-5740. The associated remediating PTFs are: Release 7.3 – SI68466; Release 7.2 – SI68467; Release …

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• Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

  November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

  Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …

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• Maxava Adds New Products, Partners, And Users Around The World

  November 12, 2018 Marco Govender

  (Sponsored Content) Maxava, a worldwide developer of best in class disaster recovery and high availability software for the IBM i platform have been busy rolling out their bundled offering that includes their new products Mi8 for Cloud based monitoring, Mi7 for Cloud based security monitoring, and CPR, which is a recycle bin for the IBM i.

  Simon O’Sullivan, senior vice president at Maxava, says: “Our strategy of having all these products designed to work together in concert has been a great move for us as a company. We are winning new partners and new customers around the world.” …

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• Guru: Configure Collection Services

  November 12, 2018 Dawn May

  Collection Services collects valuable information about your partition and the workloads you are running. While many think of Collection Services as performance data, it is really systems management data and at some point you will need that data. Collection Services helps you understand the overall workload running on your system and trends over time. It provides the ability to look backwards in time to understand “How did I get here?” and has the data to answer a wide variety of other questions.

  Collection Services is on by default, so whether you know it or not, you are running Collection Services. …

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