• IBM Bolsters Database Security with Guardium 12.0

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the Guardium database security software is expected to help customers detect insider threats faster and better comply with audit mandates, according to IBM. Guardium 12.0 also brings expanded support for databases and easier management in hybrid cloud environments, the company says.

  IBM bought Guardium back in 2009 in order to improve its capability to monitor databases for possible security violations and SQL injection attacks. The security software helped to automate database security tasks by implementing a policy-based control layer for transactions as well as anomaly detection routines to single out potentially criminal behavior that would otherwise …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, September 27

  September 27, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  Investing in the future of the IBM i is not something we hear much about. So, when we learned about a new fellowship program from Kisco Systems, we were all ears. The goal of this new program is to encourage IBM i customers to launch careers by helping them develop IBM i skills in house. Applicants for the fellowship must be sponsored by an active IBM i customer and will receive: free IBM i and RPG training; a one-year COMMON membership including registration for two conferences; and recognition in the IBM i community through podcasts and the COMMON Education Foundation. …

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• The IBM i Marketplace Survey Needs Your Input

  September 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe it, but this is the tenth year that Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, is taking a survey of the IBM i customers base so it can put together a report to tell us all how we are doing.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power …

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• Rocket DevOps Now Supports VS Code

  September 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who prefer to code within VS Code can now get all the goodness of automated change management and CI/CD with Rocket Software’s DevOps offering, which now supports the popular browser-based development environment, among other new features.

  VS Code, which is short for Visual Studio Code, has rocketed to popularity in the IBM i community over the past couple of years. That popularity is due in large part to Code for IBM i, the Liam Allan-developed plug-in that brings ILE language support to Microsoft’s open source IDE.

  Allan, who is known to despise IBM’s full-fledged Java-based IDE, …

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• DR Testing As A Service: One More Thing That You Don’t Have To Do

  September 25, 2023 David Fahrenkrug

  If not having a disaster recovery plan for your IBM i system is scary to think about – and clearly a lot of IBM i shops are not thinking about it beyond restoring from tape or virtual tape library because if they did, they would get together a disaster recovery plan – then maybe between the fifth and tenth most scary things in the datacenter today is actually making sure that the disaster recovery software works and the plan for recovery in the event of something going haywire actually works.

  High availability clustering and disaster recovery software is, by necessity, …

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• The First Step In DevOps Is Not Tools, But Culture Change

  September 25, 2023 Andrew Clark

  The combination and automation of application development and IT operations, commonly known as DevOps, is itself like the processes it automates – it is a process of continual change through iteration and improvement. And so, like most things in life (other than vacation, maybe), it is a journey – not a destination.

  When people think about a DevOps roadmap journey, they are typically thinking about putting in some kind of DevOps tooling like git or Jenkins; this is really not the place to start – the first step on the DevOps roadmap, for most companies, is actually a culture change. …

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• As I See It: IT Come Home

  September 25, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Wanna buy a skyscraper, cheap? Need an extra million square feet of space to store your stuff? Want enough living space for you and 600 of your closest friends? No problem. In large and mid-sized cities across the country, once-robust downtowns are looking a bit gaunt. Storefronts are shuttered, restaurants are struggling, and once-thick downtown traffic has noticeably thinned. And for that, you can thank, or blame, technology.

  Specifically, the technology that allowed so many of us to work from home during the Covid years. We got spoiled, enjoying unprecedented flexibility, freedom, independence, and convenience. No commute, no set hours, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 39

  September 25, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  This is not new news, but recurring news. IBM has once again pushed the implementation date of an IP change for tech support out a couple of times, and, here it is again. IBM’s notice:

  “Due to technical issues, the September 19/20 change has been postponed. Additional guidance will be provided by October 6, 2023. For those that have adjusted their firewall configuration, please do not remove the new entries until we provide further guidance. Preparing customer firewalls and proxies for the upcoming infrastructure changes – Call Home, Electronic Fix Distribution.”

  You can find out more about this issue, which …

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• ARCAD’s Deal with IBM for DevOps In Merlin Is Exclusive

  September 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched Merlin in 2022, it touted the browser-based environment as a new way to deliver functionality to the IBM i installed base and potentially to distribute third-party solutions. But right now, the only third-party vendor IBM is working with when it comes to Merlin is ARCAD Software, which has exclusive rights to supply the DevOps components within Merlin, according to executives with both companies.

  IBM introduced Merlin with great fanfare in May 2022 as a potentially transformative technology. Not only was Merlin the first browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) from IBM, providing an alternative to the powerful but …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava

  September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.

  This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …

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