• IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.

  Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.

  The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 16

  February 16, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  Some of you may be noticing a need for a chief data officer within your organization, although it appears to be more common to see that role added to an existing employee’s responsibilities. The task of creating business value from data isn’t as easy as it might sound, but it is something nearly every organization would like to do. This week, we’re sharing an article about what to look for in a CDO, as well as a link to the page of IBM’s CDO, which should offer some food for thought if that’s a position you, or your company, is …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 7

  February 16, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  To help you deal with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as a companion to the IBM i PTF Guide that has the latest information on what you need to worry about and do about it when it comes to this vulnerability.

  You can down the Log4j spreadsheet at this link.

  And just a reminder that there is a new version of Navigator for i, which you can find out more about at this link. This modern user interface can be accessed from http://hostname:2002/Navigator.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.

  IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022

  February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad

  IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.

  IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …

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• Guru: Backup to an NAS using RSYNC

  February 14, 2022 Dan Devoe

  Like many small shops, we use a simple tape drive to backup most of our libraries and the contents of the IFS. Each workday, the tape would be changed and the previous tape taken home by someone in IT in case of a disaster.

  But then, COVID hit – there was no one in the office to switch tapes and the same tape was being used to perform nightly backups. What if we discovered a problem with the data from two nights ago? Ordinarily, we would restore one or more libraries or files from the appropriate tape.

  I set up …

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• IBM Revs FlashSystem Line, Adds Cyber Vault

  February 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week debuted new members of its family of NVM-Express all-flash storage arrays, including the FlashSystem 7300 and FlashSystem 9500 arrays. It also launched a new release of the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and rolled out the Cyber Vault to thwart ransomware.

  The FlashSystem 7300 replaces FlashSystem 7200 in the all-flash hierarchy of IBM systems, delivering a 25 percent performance boost. According to IBM’s hardware announcement, each 2U device will feature two node canisters, each with two 10-core Intel Cascade Lake processors and 128 GB of cache standard (with options ranging up to 1.5 TB). The array has …

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• Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.

  To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.

  The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …

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• Marketplace Study Shows How IBM i Language Use Evolves

  February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s no secret that RPG dominates development on the IBM i platform. SQL and Control Language (CL) are also heavily used in the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of IBM i shops. But what about other established languages, like Java and C++? What about newer open source languages, like PHP and Node.js? The recent HelpSystems Marketplace Study provides us a clue into language use.

  HelpSystems published its first IBM i Marketplace Study back in January 2016, reflecting data collected in late 2015 from 834 IBM i professionals around the world. One of the questions it has consistently asked is …

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• To My Dearest IBM i . . .

  February 9, 2022 Visual LANSA

   

  Very rarely do hardware and software stay together for so long…

  Hardware finds newer, younger, more trendy software….

  The trendiest software jumps to the best hardware….

  But every so often…

  The best hardware and software stay together for a lifetime!

   

  To My Dearest IBM i:

  As Valentine’s Day approaches, I wanted to profess my love and gratitude to you. Although we have spent over 30 Valentine’s Days together, I didn’t want this one to pass us by without acknowledging the special place you hold in my heart.

  I have watched you blossom from a young aspiring server to the …

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