• More Withdrawals For Vintage Power Gear

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In with the new and out with the old, as the adage goes. With the Power9 line of Power Systems machines all out and for the most part available – with the exception of the high end Power E980 that will be available in stages in September and November – it is time to start winding down more of the older stuff.

  In announcement letter 918-097, IBM started to remove more things from the product catalog. The most important one in this round will happen on October 19, and that is when companies will no longer be able to …

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• iSam Blue Offers Choice for IBM i High Availability

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops searching for a high availability solution have several options to choose from. One that they might not be familiar with is iSam Blue, a small Utah company that sells a solution called iSB-HA. According to iSam Blue’s president, the company is doing well by competing on affordability and service.

  If you’ve followed the history of high availability software on IBM i and its predecessor systems, the name Robert Seal will sound familiar. Before founding iSam Blue, Seal was best known as the original developer for iTera’s data replication software, called Echo2 Seal and iTera parted ways, …

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• Debunking Legacy Myths

  August 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the rush to modernize IT and digitally transform our businesses, legacy systems like IBM i and System z come under increased scrutiny, which is fair. After all, blind loyalty to a particular platform – even Big Blue’s historically stable ones — is a recipe for failure in a dynamic business environment. But when technology providers make questionable claims about the nature of legacy systems in an attempt to sway decision-making, those claims should bear as much scrutiny as the platforms do themselves.

  Which brings us to the recent e-book published by First National Technology Solutions and co-sponsored by Dell …

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• IBM Adds Mainstream Flash Drives To Power Systems

  August 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We tend to be focused on compute in the IT industry, and the CPUs get a lot of the glory. But the fastest CPU in the world doesn’t amount to anything without peripherals to keep it fed. That is why, of course, that the main frame was called that, after all. There were plenty of other frames surrounding it, making it into a system.

  This holds as true for the Power Systems machines as much as any other machine, and whether or not they are running IBM i, too. The good news is that IBM does a fairly good …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 22

  August 22, 2018 Dan Burger

  Power9 continues to grab headlines this week, inside and outside the Jungle, as the number crunchers continue to wonder if IBM’s latest release will result in continued good fortune (and good revenue reporting) for Big Blue. AI also stays on the hot topic list, bringing up some interesting (and maybe scary) theories for the future. But using data to your advantage can pay off big dividends and recruiters are starting to look for new ways to find the right talent for the job (think: Moneyball). Surprisingly COBOL popped up on our news radar this week with a refreshing look at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 33

  August 22, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  This week in IBM i PTF Land is sponsored by snakes. Pythons to be specific. To be more precise, there are vulnerabilities in Python that make it susceptible to denial of service attacks.

  Here are the fixes to take care of that. Release 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 have the same number PTF applicable for all three OS releases:

  • 5733OPS Option 2 SI68164
  • 5733OPS Option 4 SI67937

  Release 7.2 and 7.3 support Python version 2.7/3.6 in the RPM format. You can find out more at this link.

  New links this week in the IBM i PTF Guide:

  • Cannot Save

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• Drilling Down Into The Power E980

  August 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On August 7, IBM announced the two machines that are based on the “Cumulus” scale-up versions of the Power9 processors – the Power E950 midrange box that scales up to four sockets and the Power E980 big iron machine that scales up to 16 sockets. The IBM i platform is not available on the Power E950, so IBM i customers who need more than a two-socket Power9 machine to support their workloads have to make a jump to a single-node implementation of the Power E980.

  This is the same situation that customers faced during the Power8 era, so it is …

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• In Support Of IBM i Technical Competence

  August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The lack of IBM i skills in the midrange community has been debated at great length, in this publication and other venues. Whether there’s a critical shortage of IBM i skills or not, nobody will argue with the fact that it’s important to keep one’s technical abilities up-to-date, which is the focus of a new educational outfit calling itself IBM i Competence that’s holding its first official event this week in Scandinavia.

  IBM i Competence was founded by Power Systems Champion Torbjörn Appehl earlier this year with the goal of providing targeted educational sessions on specific IBM i topics for …

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• Guru: Make It Easy On Someone Else

  August 20, 2018 Ted Holt

  “Make it easy on yourself,” warbled Dionne Warwick when I was just a pup. That may be good advice when severing a romantic relationship, but not when programming computers. Instead of making it easy on ourselves, we who develop and support applications need to make it easy on the people we serve.

  Recently I worked on a project in which users had to enter time values into various Web pages. The original specifications stated that users would enter time values in a format we commonly use in the United States: two-digit hour, a colon, two-digit minute, a space, …

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• GDPR Compliance On IBM i A Work In Progress, Survey Finds

  August 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  About 50 percent of IBM i shops say they’re compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to a recent survey by SoftLanding Systems. However, about a quarter of survey respondents say they have a way to go before they’re confident in their GDPR preparedness, the IBM i vendor says.

  GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, made big changes to laws governing how companies and other organizations are allowed to collect, process, and store data about European Union citizens. While not every American firm is required to adhere to GDPR, those that do business with …

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