• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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• IBM i 7.2 End Dates Revealed as Power7 Shutdown Looms

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM surprised nobody last week when it announced that it will stop selling IBM i 7.2 next April and cease supporting the operating system a year later. The lead time should give IBM i shops plenty of runway to prepare their upgrade strategies and transition to newer versions of the operating system. A potentially more impactful deadline for those not paying close attention is the end of hardware support for Power7 boxes in less than two weeks.

  Last week’s announcement of end of sales and support for IBM i 7.2 and related software products was not unexpected. That’s because IBM …

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• IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.

  The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 18

  September 18, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  This week, Steve Will, Chief Architect of the IBM i, tweeted out the link this week for new followers. It’s interesting to think there are still new followers popping up, but if you’re one of the Twitter holdout, you might want to consider giving it a try. The Twitter-verse gives us direct access to the movers and shakers of our ecosystem (not to mention the writers of IT Jungle), and it’s a great place to see the chatter around our little ecosystem. Of course, if you still don’t think Twitter is for you, you can always count on Four Hundred …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 37

  September 18, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First up, IBM has a new support site for IBM i customers coming in October. You can see a video describing this at this link. And now back to our regularly scheduled PTF programming. In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, we find that there are new HIPERs and new Security groups for all four current releases – that’s IBM i 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4.

  We don’t have any new links in the Guide this week, and we came up dry on tips, too. (It is like that some days.)

  The Guide at a …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to improbable or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

  (That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …

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• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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• Unperspective: In Your Face

  September 16, 2019 Trevor Perry

  A few years ago, I was asked to present a keynote session for a conference and the request was something along these lines: “I would like to learn how to change the other programmers in my shop – they won’t evolve with the times.” What a great challenge! I was ready to find the answer.

  I spent some time researching this topic, and my initial thoughts were confirmed. Humans, generally, are afraid of change. As we age, our comfort zone becomes smaller – and more comfortable. We know we are good at what we have been doing for years, and …

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• Maxava Hits Multiple Targets With The Same HA Arrow

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Downtime is never a good thing for any business, except maybe for those who sell high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for a living. And to be honest, these companies explicitly want to keep the downtime and the recovery time to the smallest period as possible. The fear of downtime should be enough to motivate us all to replicate out systems.

  But sometimes, just having two systems in a high availability cluster is not enough. Some companies need belts with their suspenders, and maybe even a bunch of different belts because they really can’t be down. To that end, …

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