• IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

  Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Clearing Up Some Cloud And IBM i Computing Myths

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We hear a lot of talk about cloud these days, but who is walking the walk? The coronavirus pandemic made a lot of companies take a hard look at how they were doing business, and hardware wasn’t excluded from this conversation. Businesses are now saying, with so many cloud options available, where and how can they start getting their feet wet?

  We certainly all know that the IBM i community is dramatically different from most other platforms in the IT space, and has been since Day One. For household names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, …

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• Guru: Use SQL To Replace Reports

  June 14, 2021 Ted Holt

  Does anybody write report programs anymore? If so, why? Reports are so twentieth-century. The people we serve want spreadsheets, Web pages, cell-phone apps and other modern conveniences. What we need is an easy way to make our report programs write the same information to modern interfaces without having to perform major surgery on them.

  Some 10 years or so ago, I built a scripting language to enable me to reformat spooled files into stream files in CSV format. I called my utility BASS. It was, and continues to be, a successful project.

  But BASS is not the only way …

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• Security Checks Drive Consulting Biz for Briteskies

  June 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With high-profile ransomware attacks becoming the norm and calls for a federal cybersecurity department gaining steam, there’s a distinct uneasiness when it comes to the security of corporate computer systems. That uptick in awareness is helping to drive business for Briteskies, the Cleveland, Ohio-based IT consultancy that has made IBM i security a cornerstone of its business.

  Briteskies was founded in 2000 primarily as a JD Edwards specialist for organizations in the Great Lakes region. Over the years, the company has expanded into other niches, including Magento e-commerce systems, custom RPG development, and computer security.

  The market for IBM i …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 24

  June 14, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Don’t get hyper this week, but the big thing happening in IBM i Land is a set of high impact and pervasive, or HIPER, PTF patches to all four current variants of the IBM i operating system. There are also tweaks to storage PTFs and for the MQSeries message queueing middleware that runs on various platforms from Big Blue, including IBM i.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/V9.2.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for

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• Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …

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• Watson-Inspired Pattern Matching Drives IBM i Performance Breakthrough

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What do human diseases and IBM i performance problems have in common? For starters, they both can generate quite a bit of data. In the case of the humans, it was enough for IBM to train its AI technology, Watson, to find patterns buried in the data and come up with diagnoses. Now the Danish software company iPerformance is using a variation on that approach with GiAPA, its Global i Application Performance Analyzer.

  When iPerformance founder Kaare Plesner saw a demo of IBM Watson developing medical diagnoses, he figured a similar approach could work for sorting through the reams of …

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• Certified Pre-Owned Storage: More Than Just A Pretty Price

  June 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  People tend to think first and foremost about servers when they think of IT infrastructure, but a true system, even if it is a monolithic, standalone server with as few as one or as many as 16 sockets, always includes storage. And in distributed systems that can grow beyond the scale up limits of NUMA machines and scale out to add compute capacity, they always include storage (whether converged on the server nodes or run alongside the cluster on the network) and they also always include networking.

  No matter what, storage is a big component of every enterprise system, ranging …

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• Security Vendor Shopping Spree Continues for HelpSystems

  June 9, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems quietly nabbed two more security software vendors last month, Agari and Beyond Security, just days after it brought on a new investor, a private equity firm called Harvest Partners Structured Capital.

  The deal to bring in Harvest Partners SCF, LP was announced on May 6, when HelpSystems announced that a definitive agreement has been signed for HP SCF to take a minority stake in the company, joining existing investors TA Associates, Charlesbank Capital Partners, HGGC, and HelpSystems employees.

  HP SCF principal Chris Peyser, who will take a place on HelpSystems board, lauded the Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company for its …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 9

  June 9, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  Remember the days of summer camp? As a kid, summer camp memories might include swimming and hiking, roasting marshmallows, and even feeling a little homesick. Common Europe has reimagined summer camp with the IBM i professional in mind, and you don’t even have to go anywhere to join in on the fun. Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition begins running live on the Internet on June 14, and it is free to attend. Topics will include the IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems as implemented on Power hardware. You can get more information and find out how …

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