• Court Throws Out Lawsuit From Chinese Power Systems Partner Against Big Blue

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not often that we get any insight into the geopolitical workings of the Power Systems business that is central to this publication and to all of you who work on the IBM i platform. Often, the only way we learn anything is when two parties sue each other in court. Such is the case with the lawsuit filed against Big Blue back in September 2021 by Beijing Neu Cloud Oriental System Technology. The lawsuit, as it turns out, was tossed out of court last week.

  China has presented as many challenges as it has opportunities for all …

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• A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

  First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

  When …

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• IBM Gives Temporary Reprieve For Power8 Core And Memory Activations

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is pretty generous when it comes to having features for past generations of machines available for purchase, even when they are two generations back from whatever it is currently selling. But sooner or later, IBM wants to sell the new machines and it stops selling the old stuff. Even if it is only processor and memory activations on machines that are already in the field, which is the easiest sale in the world because IBM doesn’t really have to do much.

  This may be the most profitable kind of sale that Big Blue does, but sooner or later, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 46

  November 14, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  This week, you will find much to your surprise that Access Client Solutions 1.1.9.1, which was promised for delivery on December 2 back at the NAViGATE 2022 COMMON conference in St Louis, is out a few weeks early. We saw it available and downloaded it on November 11, which means it is a few weeks early.

  ACS 1.1.9.1 follows on the heels of the 1.1.9.0 release that came out in April 2022, with mitigations for the Log4j security vulnerabilities. We don’t know the full set of enhancements yet, but this IBM i – ACS Updates page at Big Blue …

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• IBM and Microsoft Bring .NET to Power, After All

  November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Despite initially denying the existence of a project to bring the Microsoft .NET runtime to Power, IBM this week officially announced that .NET version 7 will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power. The technology becomes available immediately, although the database driver connecting .NET applications to Db2 for i will take more time.

  Over the years, there have been various attempts at getting the .NET runtime unhooked from its Windows roots and replanted on the Power platform, including some targeting the IBM i operating system. In 2011, a big step forward was made with the Mono Project, which …

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• Myth Buster: Changing Your HA/DR Software Is Not Hard Work!

  November 9, 2022 Ash Giddings

  With inflation putting an added squeeze on IT spend, now is the right time to look at potential HA/DR alternatives. But, given its importance, you need to ensure that you are improving your resilience, and not trading off functionality, performance, and support to make savings.

  Logical replication, for high availability and disaster recovery, has been the “go-to” technology for many years, and is still very much the leading approach within the IBM i community.

  Nervousness about what costs, implementation effort and trade-offs may be required to change HA/DR solutions, means that many organizations simply rollover the status quo. In doing …

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• How HelpSystems Became Fortra

  November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems, a longtime provider of utilities for IBM i servers and their predecessors, has been on the security warpath of late, using private equity funding to acquire dozens of security software and services firms. The Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company officially completed its pivot to security last week by changing its name to Fortra.

  HelpSystems started life back in 1982 when it was founded by Dick Jacobson, who created the first Robot/38 product. Over the years, the company (then called “Help/Systems”) would expand its well-respected suite of general-purpose Robot utilities, such as job scheduling, backup and recovery, and system monitoring, for …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 9

  November 9, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  It’s been another busy week in the Jungle. Even as the year is winding down, there is lots happening around our industry, and we’ve got it filtered down to something more quickly digestible in Monitor. We found a few interesting and fun news tidbits for you, as well as some new resources. We may need to start a podcast section as we’re watching that niche work its way into the IBM i ecosystem. The calendar is starting to look a little thin as we head into the holidays, but we do have a few events left that might be of …

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• The Rich Parfait That Is Cloud Spending

  November 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Most IBM i shops are so used to having an integrated system that runs their mission critical systems of record and some of their systems of engagement and Web infrastructure workloads, too, that they may forget that the rest of the world does not always experience their IT in this relatively monolithic way.

  The top 50,000 or so organizations in the world tend to take a best-of-breed approach to every application and its underlying layers of infrastructure, so they have a hodge-podge of stuff. The next million or so organizations have to be more conservative and keep the infrastructure diversity …

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• Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud

  November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.

  We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …

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