• Thoroughly Modern: How To Optimize IT In 2023

  January 16, 2023 Jeff Swartz

  It should be no surprise to anyone that applications running on IBM i are business critical. In many cases, these crucial systems keep the business alive day-to-day. Working with organizations around the globe, we are seeing a lot of activity happening in the IBM i space to optimize operations and put in new workload models. Many IT organizations are looking at upgrading. This includes implementing tech refreshes and moving to Power10 systems.

  Now is the time really to think about what the ideal model is for where to run which applications.

  Historically, when companies looked at infrastructure upgrades, they would …

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• Is That What You Think Modernization Means?

  January 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When most IBM i shops think about “modernization,” what they are talking about is taking legacy applications and in some fashion – and quite possible with many different methods – making those applications work better on newer kinds of clients and/or using newer front-end technologies to make them function better or look better. The researchers at IDC have a more expansive definition of modernization, at least according to a whitepaper that the market researcher recently did on behalf of the Power Systems line at IBM.

  That whitepaper, entitled The Key Requirements of Modernization and the Role of IBM Power10, …

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• Tune In To The 2023 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webinar

  January 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall, many of you took part in the 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that is done by Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems. And on January 26, Fortra will host the webinar at 10 a.m. Eastern time that will unveil the results of the survey and present historical trends and analysis by a collection of experts.

  You can sign up for the webinar at this link, which is free and which will last for an hour.

  Among the many topics that will be covered are:

  • Power10 adoption and future plans
  • How organizations continue to support remote

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 3

  January 16, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Last week was pretty quiet in PTF Land, as many of you might have expected. And considering that we were dealing with the Log4J vulnerability nonsense this time last year, we will take that as a bonus and just have Volume 24, Number 2, of the IBM i PTF Guide as a placeholder of sorts. This week is a bit more interesting, but nothing too big as yet. We have another 49 weeks in the year, so no hurry.

  Just a reminder to read and heed: IBM Electronic Fix Distribution / IBM Fix Central systems will end support for unencrypted …

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• Loopback Hackathon Set for Next Week

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The Loopback Hackathon organized by Common Europe last fall was such a hit that the organization is teaming up with COMMON North America for another hackathon next week. And like the previous hackathon, this one is also focused on using IBM i with Loopback, a popular Node.js framework for rapid development of REST APIs.

  Mark Irish, an advisory software developer with the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, was tapped to lead the first Loopback Hackathon, which took place in the Netherlands. Spearheaded by Common Next Gen, a youth-oriented group that’s part of Common Europe, the event was a big …

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• Lessons from Southwest’s IT Debacle

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  During the historic Christmas Blizzard of 2022, air traffic came nearly to a standstill across the United States. Most major airlines rebounded before the ice fully melted, but Southwest Airlines was unable to get its Boeing 737s back up in the air. The main reason cited may have a familiar ring to it for IBM i shops: An overreliance on outdated, legacy technology.

  Not all the details are known about what went on at Southwest Airlines during the week that followed the winter storm that decimated the eastern half of the country for several days, starting on Christmas Eve. But …

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• Is Julia Coming to IBM i Next?

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM has brought several popular open source languages to the IBM i operating system over the years, including PHP, Node.js, R, and Python. Now some are speculating that Julia, a high-performance general purpose language that has been widely adopted in data science, may be next.

  Julia is a high-level programming language that is applicable to a range of fields, but has mostly been used for technical computing, such as numerical analysis, scientific computing, and data science. Originally developed in 2009 by a group of MIT researchers, the language was designed to be fast and efficient, with a just-in-time (JIT) compiler …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 11

  January 11, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Happy New Year! It’s been a few weeks since we last published Monitor, and we hope you enjoyed some downtime over the holidays. (We certainly were grateful for the break.) Breaktime is officially over, however, and we are happy to be back at it this week. It seems like we aren’t the only ones who are charging full steam ahead into 2023. There are lots of new items on the Calendar below for you to review, plus some recent news and resources to peruse along the way. We are looking forward to another year of keeping you informed, so let’s …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 1

  January 11, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  The New Year is always marked with celebration, but this year we also celebrate 25 years of the PTF Guide! The best way I can think of for you to celebrate is to make sure you are up to date on your PTF work.

  We start off 2023 with a series of Security Bulletins. First up, IBM Navigator for i is vulnerable to log file access, obtaining file attributes, and SQL Injection attacks due to multiple vulnerabilities. Get the details HERE.

  IBM i Release		5770DG1 IBM HTTP Server for i Group PTF
  7.5				SF99952 - 05
  7.4				SF99662 - 

  …

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• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

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