• Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

  July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through business, changing the way companies operate and resetting customer expectations. Businesses that can’t keep up with these evolving needs face long-term headwinds in terms of competitiveness. Implementing a modernization strategy is paramount for companies in these situations, but where do you start?

  While business closures from COVID-19 were bad, they could have been a lot worse. A 2021 study released by the Federal Reserve concluded that 200,000 establishments closed as a result of the pandemic. That was lower than a study from a year earlier that found 400,000 establishments could close. “Actual exit is …

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• Service Express Buys iTech Solutions, iInTheCloud

  July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It was a “double i” acquisition day recently for Service Express, the IBM business partner that completed acquisitions of iTech Solutions and iInTheCloud on July 5. The moves give Service Express a much bigger presence for IBM i cloud services in the US after it completed a similar deal in the UK.

  Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Service Express broke into the IT market decades ago servicing DEC and VaxAlpha accounts. Over the years, the company has grown its presence in the IBM market, providing hardware systems, solution sales, and managed services, in addition to managed services, IT asset disposition, …

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• ATS Group Looks For Patterns In The IT Chaos With Galileo Suite

  July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you’re having trouble keeping track of a busy IT environment, you’re not alone — many organizations are in the same boat as you. But when you check out many observability tools, you’ll often find they don’t even know how to spell “IBM i.” That is not the case with Galileo Suite, a collection of IT monitoring and observability tools from Advanced Technology Service Group that supports a range of operating systems, including IBM i.

  IT Jungle caught sight of Galileo Suite at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference in New Orleans, where the company behind the suite, ATS Group, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 20

  July 20, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  We’re always watching for the health of our ecosystem, and one of the easiest indicators on how thing are going is to watch the bottom line. This week, IBM reported a better-than-expected second fiscal quarter 2022 during its financial analyst conference call, and the analysts seem to agree the reasonable, although no one seems to be celebrating too hard as the worry of possibility of weakening IT spending looms in light of unprecedented inflation. But it’s OK to remain hopeful that the good trends will continue, and there’s more good news to go through, like the first article in Tim …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 29

  July 20, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Please note that we will be moving V7R1M0 from weekly update to archive. Anything new we are informed of that impacts IBM i 7.1, we will post here in the What’s NEW! Section at the top of the story. Also, if you have any IBM i 7.1 requests going forward, we will do our best to provide responses for. Thank you for your readership and support!

  To begin with, there are Save and Restore Enhancements for IBM i 7.5, which you can find out more about here. RSTUSRPRF USRPRF(*ALL) no longer requires a dedicated system. The progress message displayed …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1014

  July 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power10 entry and midrange machines are going to be with us for a long time, and so we are going to take our time and go through the different models, in their natural family groupings, and do a deep dive into the machines so you can make better decisions about where to go with your future system. This week, we start at the bottom of the line with the Power S1014, which will be the workhorse machine for many IBM i shops and which will probably be the highest volume box in the Power10 lineup over the next three …

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• What Happens To IBM i In A “Zero Datacenter, Zero Mainframe” FedEx?

  July 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Federal Express, the pioneer in overnight document delivery for business founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1971 by Frederick Smith, did not start out in the ground shipping business. But it did start its datacenter operations on IBM mainframes, as any company needing complex and intense computing would at the time, and it chose Memphis, Tennessee, in the heart of America, as its headquarters and base of operations in 1973 when the company moved from a PhD thesis at Yale University to a true business.

  In 1983, FedEx made history by being the first company in the United States to …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

  July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …

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• As I See It: Pass The Chips

  July 18, 2022 Victor Rozek

  Decades ago, I was sent to Taiwan and met a colleague there to install a computer system in a silicon wafer manufacturing facility and provide necessary training to the staff. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Taipei and recall marveling at the extraordinarily generous freeways that served surprisingly light traffic flows. In many places, six to eight lanes stretched for miles in both directions supporting traffic that could have been accommodated by no more than two.

  I became curious and finally asked my driver if he knew why the roadways were so incongruously wide? It …

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• Support For Java 7 Ending WAS 8.5 On IBM i

  July 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are running the traditional version of WebSphere Application Server 8.5 atop a Java 7 codebase will need to upgrade to Java 8 or risk running out of support from IBM.

  At the end of July, IBM will cease to support WAS Traditional 8.5 running on JDK 7.0/7.1. Customers will need to upgrade their WAS 8.5 environments to JDK 8.0 to maintain support with IBM. IBM currently provides full support for WAS 8.5 and WAS 9.0 running on JDK 8.0. You can read more about this on the Official Support Statement for the IBM WebSphere Application Server …

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