• Four Hundred Monitor, November 17

  November 17, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  While those of us in the Jungle are looking forward to the Thanksgiving break next week here in the U.S., which brings some much-needed downtime to recharge before the race to the end of the year, the folks at IBM are charging forward in the week following its formal separation from Kyndryl. Much of the news this week is focused on the aftermath and what we can expect from IBM now that it can redirect its all of its energies toward itself once again. Hopefully this refocus will result in good news for our little slice in the week and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 46

  November 17, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  If you are on older releases of IBM i 7, you are getting a breather this week when it comes to PTF patches for your systems. There just ain’t a lot going on, and in the operating system and security world, you take that as a win. Those of you on the IBM i 7.4 release, you have a few things to think about but it is fairly straightforward and related to the Db2 for i database and for those of you who have it, the Db2 Mirror for i database clustering software.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups …

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• Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.

  But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …

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• Talking Certified Pre-Owned Equipment With Arrow

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Arrow Electronics is one of the three master distributors of IBM Power Systems machines and related storage in North America, and it also has decades of experience selling secondhand equipment as well as new gear through its partnership with IBM.

  Recently, Arrow has partnered with IBM so its resellers can offer their Power Systems and Storage customers certified pre-owned equipment that has been put through the remanufacturing processes of IBM’s Global Asset Recovery Services business. This is now the sole means by which Arrow is helping its resellers bring CPO machinery to Power Systems and Storage shops that, for many …

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• Guru: Physical System Performance

  November 15, 2021 Dawn May

  Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …

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• Oracle JDK Is Free Again, But OpenJDK Still Recommended

  November 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Oracle has reversed course on a controversial decision to charge companies a licensing fee to use its Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) and has once again make the Java technology free, starting with the recently released Oracle JDK version 17. However, the move hasn’t changed IBM’s recommendations regarding which Java package IBM i shops use to run Access Client Solutions (ACS) software

  Oracle angered the Java-using community back in 2018 when it decided to stop distributing the Oracle JDK version 11 for free and charge companies a fee for commercial use (starting at $30 per desktop per year, and $300 …

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• IBM Adds ServicePacs For Power Machine Setup, Other Tweaks

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The legacy IBM Company from decades gone by charged a hell of a lot for its systems and offered a slew of handholding to make it all worthwhile. Somewhere along the way, service became a profit center and a revenue driver instead of an attitude about customer service, and you can’t entirely blame IBM because time is money and people don’t obey Moore’s Law economics.

  The ServicePac offerings that Big Blue has put together in recent years, which cover just about every aspect of its hardware and software stack, seem like a mix of old and new. Yes, the services …

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• Consider Modernizing Your Approach to IBM i Security, Too

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i users are facing the reality that they need to modernize their IBM i applications, especially those based on monolithic blocks of fixed-format RPG. But other aspects of the IBM i experience can use some renovating too, including how organizations manage their security settings. Luckily, in the last few Technology Refreshes to IBM i, IBM has provided a slew of new SQL-based services for doing just that.

  Traditionally on IBM i, administrators had two main approaches for viewing and changing security settings. They could view and control the settings directly using commands, often automated through CL programs. Or …

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• Fabric Company Keeps to Its Knitting with Cleo

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Camira Fabrics Ltd. has historically run its core operations on the IBM i platform. But when the UK company started expanding through acquisition, it suddenly found itself running a number of specialized ERP systems. Rather than embarking upon risky migrations, the company took an integration-based approach using tools from Cleo.

  Based in Mirfield, a city in Northern England, Camira Fabrics has been making fabrics for nearly 200 years. The company today designs and manufacture upholstery and panel textiles for a range of uses, including education, healthcare, hospitality, busses, RVs, and trains.

  The company, which manufactures 8 million meters of fabric …

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• IBM i Developer Day This Week

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers of all stripes are welcome to IBM i Developer Day, a free virtual event that’s scheduled to take place next Friday, November 19, at 1 p.m. ET. Organized by Liam Allan, the event will feature a heavy dose of Visual Studio Code (Allan’s favorite IDE) plus discussions hosted by IBMers on the future of IBM i and its role in the cloud.

  The world of application development is moving fast, but many IBM i pros are still stuck in the past when it comes to the tools, technologies, and techniques they use. While RPG and COBOL development …

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