• New GM Wants To Push IBM Power With Hybrid Cloud And AI

  November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Three months ago, the Power division within IBM’s Infrastructure group got a new general manager. This changing of the guard happens every couple of years as Big Blue moves executives around so they can get managerial experience across different lines of business, and this time around, it is Tom McPherson who has been tapped for the top job in the division that is the home of the IBM i platform.

  McPherson got his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Rutgers University in 1990 and got his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1994. We don’t …

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• IBM Finally Comments On Db2 Web Query For i Withdrawal

  November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A little more than a month ago, in announcement letter AD23-0691, IBM abruptly announced the end of marketing for all variations of the Db2 Web Query for i data analytics tool.

  At the time, neither IBM nor its partner, TIBCO Software – which is part of Cloud Software Group, a conglomerate that owns TIBCO (which bought Information Builders and Spotfire), JasperSoft, and Citrix Systems (which includes products from Citrix, NetScaler, ShareFile, and XenServer) – had anything to say about the partnership between IBM and TIBCO/Information Builders coming undone.

  But something has happened between Big Blue on the one hand …

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• IBM To Add Generative AI To QRadar

  November 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you feel that cyber crooks are getting the upper hand, you’re not alone. Studies show cybercrime volume booming while security professionals struggle to connect the dots and keep up. One possible route forward was presented last week by IBM, which announced that it will add generative AI capabilities to its QRadar SIEM tool.

  Security information and event management (SIEM) tools are the sharp end of the stick for security-loving organizations, as they are where the hard work of assembling security data from all of the various components in the modern IT stack (including IBM i) and then trying to …

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• IDC Boosts IT Spending Forecasts For 2023 And Beyond

  November 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you asked 1,000 IBM i shops why they were paying a premium for their IBM i systems, all of them would tell you two things: The excellence of the database management system that is at the heart of the IBM i platform and the reliability of the underlying Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system that has the Db2 for i database embedded within it.

  As it turns out, data management, which includes databases as well as file systems and other storage, is the largest component of spending on server and storage infrastructure in 2022, and it …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 46

  November 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  There’s a bunch of stuff going on this week in IBM i PTF Land. So let’s just get to it.

  First, we have a security vulnerability, which you can find out more about in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable due to a flaw in Samba which could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions (CVE-2023-4091), located at this link. The issues can be fixed by applying a PTF to IBM i. IBM i releases 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 will be fixed. The IBM i PTF number for 5770-SS1 contains the fix for the vulnerability.

  IBM i Release	5770-SS1 

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• What’s New with Db2 Mirror, PowerHA, and BRMS

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  There’s something for everyone in the new releases of IBM i that IBM will be shipping later this month. For administrators who revel in having well-run high availability, continuous availability, and tape backups, the new releases will not disappoint.

  The most substantial enhancements appear to have been saved for Db2 Mirror for i, which is IBM’s continuous availability solution for IBM i. The new management and monitoring features should bring some major improvements to how customers interact with the product.

  Some of the biggest changes are due to the addition of the new “Health Center” component to the Db2 Mirror …

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• In A Parallel Universe, There Is An IBM i Data Warehouse, Too

  November 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the many years that we have been watching the Power Systems business – which is all of them, starting with the original RS/6000 announcement in February 1990, the first announcement we ever attended and at IBM’s original headquarters at 590 Madison in New York City – we have seen time and time again how Big Blue has rolled out parallel cluster data warehouse configurations for its AIX customers.

  Somehow, the IBM i platform and predecessor OS/400 platform have never been shown the same respect. Despite the fact that there are midrange and large enterprise customers who would very likely …

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• Remain Bolsters TD/OMS in v16 Release

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rogue or uninformed programmers will be shut out of making negative code changes to their IBM i applications with TD/OMS V16.0 Milestone 1, the inaugural release of the next major version of Remain Software’s IBM i change management software. New dashboards, training, and ChatGPT integrations also grace this new release.

  According to Remain Software CTO Wim Jongman, the new arbitrary code execution protection feature delivered with TD/OMS V16.0 last month was developed in response to customers that were suffering when programmers exploited their freedom to do not-so-smart things with the organization’s IBM i code.

  Sometimes, the freedom is necessary. “For …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 8

  November 8, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Depending on where you live, you may be struggling this week from the dreaded time change that happened to many of us over the weekend. I, for one, and definitely dragging this week, and it got me wondering: What would happen if clock changes were abolished? We’d reduce schedule disruptions and having to remember which clocks auto-update. Without losing an hour of sleep in March, you’d probably wake up feeling more refreshed and less tired than on that same weekend in past years. Even falling back has an effect as we try to establish a new rhythm and get used …

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• ATS Bolsters Power Cloud, IBM i Data Collection Suite

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  ATS Group announced yesterday that it has expanded its Power Cloud, the IBM Power-based private cloud that offers IBM i, AIX, and Linux runtimes. The company also announced that it has enhanced the IBM i data collection capabilities in Galileo Suite, its collection of IT monitoring and observability.

  ATS Group is an IBM business partner based in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The company says it has managed thousands of customer environments in its Power Cloud, which is spread across four geographically separate data centers.

  In a blog post yesterday, the company announced that it has expanded its private cloud offering. The company …

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