• Technology Refreshes, And Maybe Some Hardware Tweaks, Coming This Week

  April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have heard through the rumor mill for weeks that we should expect Technology Refreshes for the current releases of IBM i sometime this week, and Tuesday being a traditional announcement day for Big Blue, it is reasonable to assume that this will happen on April 11. With history as a guide, it is reasonable to also assume that there will be some kind of tweaks to the Power Systems hardware and to parts of the software stack that IBM has on this machines, including but not limited to, IBM i.

  This being the belly of the Power10 hardware cycle, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 15

  April 10, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  It is Spring Break in a lot of places, and also Easter and Passover as we go to press, and so it is not at all surprising that there is not a lot of activity in the IBM i PTF Guide this week. We took the opportunity to retire 7.2 worksheet, check the archives, and, DLB_PTF_04/01/23_B25N14.XLS for the last worksheet. Any changes to V7R2 going forward will be detailed here instead of the Guide.

  There are High Impact/Pervasive tweaks for all currently supported releases – IBM i 7.5, IBM i 7.4, and IBM i 7.3 – and a fix list …

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• Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.

  And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …

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• Why Modernize Applications? The Reasons Might Surprise You

  April 3, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A wave of interest in application modernization seems to be cresting over IBM i and mainframe shops in the United States and Europe, and it’s having some unanticipated impacts. We’re also getting a better understanding of what’s motivating companies to jump into these potentially risky projects, which is a topic that EvolveWare touched on in its latest report.

  EvolveWare, which develops modernization tools for mainframe and IBM i applications, discussed several aspects of modernization in its report on modernization released last month. Our first take on the report, which is titled The State of Application Modernization 2023, focused …

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• Machine Customers Are Not Customers Who Buy Machines

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is getting truly strange. I can appreciate that in a world where hundreds of millions to billions of users all make use of humongous applications that have hundreds to thousands of calls to microservices application snippets and service. But somehow, I just cannot make the leap to something that Gartner is now calling “machine customers.”

  The term came to light, for us at least, two weeks ago when two market researchers at Gartner –  Don Scheibenreif, distinguished vice president analyst and leader of Gartner’s research on customer experience, and Mark Raskino, also a distinguished vice president analyst as …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 3

  April 3, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  We may have flipped the page on the calendar, but the new month didn’t free us from the same issues that have been plaguing 2023. This week’s headlines bring us more news of layoffs and security worries, which we should probably expect to be par for the course in the foreseeable future. It’s not all bad news, though, and we have offered some resources and expert advice below to help you weather the coming weeks. Before you go, be sure to check the latest additions to our calendar for more in-person and online learning opportunities. Here’s wishing for a successful …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 14

  April 3, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  The IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 8 marker PTF is out, and we see it in HTTP Server Group 26. Nothing special so far, just the indication that it is out, but nothing on 7.3 or 7.5 groups, yet – only 7.4. Thank you, Jozef in New Zealand, for catching that, and sharing it! The Four Hundred collective thinks the IBM i TRs might be coming on April 11, but that has not been confirmed by Big Blue as yet.

  We mostly suspect this will happen because that is when ITJ Editor Alex Woodie scheduled a trip to Hawaii with …

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• LANSA Developing Business Intelligence Tool

  March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is rolling out a new Web-based business intelligence tool. Dubbed LANSA BI, the new offering is based on an underlying analytics engine from Yellowfin and will be targeted predominantly at IBM i shops looking to give users greater access to actionable data.

  LANSA has used its fourth-generation language (4GL) development environment as a springboard for many other technological endeavors over the years. From Web and mobile modernization environments to application and data integration tools, from ecommerce engines to ERP suite, the Downers Grove, Illinois, company has been there and done that.

  It has even offered customers some rudimentary query …

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• Blazing The Trail For VTL In The Cloud

  March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Making the decision to move IBM i applications to the cloud is a relatively easy endeavor. But covering all of the bases, particularly when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, takes some thought because even though the cloud is an ideal place to do HA and DR, not every cloud does it right. And doing it right often means using a mix of technologies and service providers.

  IT managers are thinking of moving their IBM i workloads to the cloud for good reasons. They do the math, they weigh the risks and rewards. They take into account all …

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• Data De-Dupe Gives VTL Customers More Options

  March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When your IBM i backup data is 10x smaller, the backups complete more quickly and the local storage requirements are smaller. But that’s just the beginning of the savings for customers of LaserVault, which added a new data de-duplication feature to its virtual tape library (VTL) last year.

  LaserVault has been providing IBM i backup solutions for many decades, and launched its line of VTL solutions in 2006. Customers can get ViTL, as the VTL is called, as a Fibre Channel- or SAS-connected backup appliance (LaserVault partners with Supermicro for hardware) or as shrink-wrapped software that customers can run on …

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