• Vulnerabilities In 3DES Encryption Put It Out To Pasture In IBM i

  November 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i customers should stop using 3DES, also known as Triple DES, ciphers due to the SWEET32 vulnerabilities that could leave sensitive information unprotected as it moves between client and server via the OpenSSL and OpenVPN protocols. This was the gist of a security alert sent last week by IBM, which also issued new PTFs to address the problems in its own IBM i products. On November 4, IBM issued security bulletin N1021697, which discussed what to do about so-called SWEET32 security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL and OpenVPN. The security problems, which are detailed in CVE-2016-2183 (for OpenSSL) and

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• IBM i Shops Do Less To Get More Done

  November 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  Offloading workloads seems to be a popular pastime for more and more IBM i shops. Some of that work goes to other platforms, but we also see the managed service providers (MSPs) with IBM i capabilities picking up jobs. Traditionally this has been disaster recovery service, but production environments are headed that way as well as shops take a closer look at internal IT staff capabilities and set business priorities. Workload distribution has become a strategic necessity. The trend of moving production IT environments to managed service providers continues to be steady among midsize companies with IT staff tied up

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Of Possible Interest

  November 14, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Jacob ben Wolf Kranz was, in the second half of the 18th century, the Preacher of Dubno or, in Yiddish, the Dubner Magid. Dubno is a small city in the Ukraine. Two and a half centuries later, Virginia Rometty, the Big Cheese of Big Blue, appears to have heard at least one of the Magid’s tales. Assisted by the Magid’s sagacity, Rometty has soothed the savages of the sell side, beguiled the barbarians of the buy side and inveigled that illustrious investor on the outside, the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet. Janet Yellen: The head of the Federal Reserve Bank

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• You’re Hired! Finding Your Next IBM i Pro

  November 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  The skills shortage dilemma for IBM i shops is a reality. It’s also an excuse. New technologies are being introduced rapid fire in IT and each has a learning curve that is being handled by people who choose to do so. It takes time and effort. This is enterprise computing. It’s slightly more difficult than learning to play the kazoo. But nearly every IBM midrange system admin or RPG programmer started out being thrown into the deep end of the pool. You don’t find new employees with the enterprise skill sets of someone with 10, 20, or 30 years of

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• Is the IBM i Skills Shortage Accelerating Platform Migrations?

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  There are a lot of headwinds working against the IBM i platform, including a high up-front cost, a legacy perception, and executives who automatically default to X64 technology with technology decisions. These are all external challenges that the IBM i community can’t do much about. But there’s one headwind that’s internal to the IBM i community: A growing lack of personnel with the requisite IBM i skills. One company that’s transitioning off the IBM i platform due, in part, to a lack of skills is PRGX. For decades, the Atlanta, Georgia, company used IBM‘s midrange server to automate many

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• Iowa MSP Teams with Vision for Hosted HA

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In the market for hosted high availability? There’s a new IBM i offering now available from Iowa managed service provider (MSP) LightEdge Solutions, which teamed up recently with Vision Solutions to put MIMIX and iTERA Availability on its private Power Cloud. LightEdge Solutions is a 20-year old IT services firm based in Des Moines that hosts and manages systems on behalf of its clients. The company currently has two data centers, including a 20,000 square-foot facility in Altoona, Iowa, and another located in the underground “SubTropolis” business complex in Kansas City, Missouri. The company is currently building two additional

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• DSI Tries Virtualized Backup and Recovery for Power Systems

  November 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  Dynamic Solutions International, a company known for its line of virtual tape library (VTL) systems designed specifically for IBM i shops, just released virtualized backup and recovery software pre-built to handle deduplication, replication and encryption. It’s called DSI Restore and it’s implemented onto a VMware environment. DSI says it new backup and recovery virtual appliance is aimed at companies that find traditional cloud-based solutions cost prohibitive. DSI considers the backup and recovery appliance on VMware as an opportunity for IBM i shops to save money compared to the cost of adding Linux/VIOS partitions to a separate Power Systems backup

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• How IBM i Fared in Top ERP List

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Every year, Panorama Consulting comes out with a list of the top ERP systems and vendors. The list for 2016 has the usual suspects in it, as well as a decent representation of ERP systems that run on the IBM i platform. While there’s no hard data on the matter, anecdotal evidence suggests that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the primary type of application that customers run on IBM i servers. Whether companies develop their own software or buy a shrink-wrapped product from a vendor, most companies that run the IBM i server bought it to run a core

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• Cybersecurity Is Hot, But Don’t Overlook Physical Security

  November 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Cybersecurity played a major role in the run-up to yesterday’s presidential election, as Russian hackers leaked private communications and attempted to influence the outcome of the election. They weren’t successful, largely because elections remain mostly a manual affair in United States. But it did serve as a reminder of the need to protect critical American institutions in both the cyber and physical worlds. In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security identified 16 infrastructure sectors that are vital to the safety, security, and health of the United States and its people. You’ll find sectors you’d expect to find there,

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• Sundry Fall Power Systems Peripheral Enhancements

  November 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still chewing through the October 11 Power Systems announcements, and this week we drill down into a variety of peripheral enhancements related to the IBM i platform. We may not have gotten new Power8+ processors for entry machines, and would have been expected sometime this year, but IBM is doing a bunch of things to make the existing Power8 machines more appealing and less costly to tide itself and its customers over until the Power9 processors ship sometime in the second half of next year. The midrange and high-end of the Power8 product line have already seen their

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