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Four Hundred Monitor, October 18
October 18, 2023 Jenny Thomas
“How do you eat an elephant?” The answer seems obvious. “One bite at a time.” The point being that you can’t complete a very large job or solve a very complex problem all at once, but you solve it by accomplishing one small task at a time and sticking with it until it is completed. The elephant in the room these days is application modernization. Many of you are tackling it within your organizations in many different ways, just like we report on it from many different angles. We start this week’s Top Stories with a quick opinion piece on …
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IBM Suddenly Pulls The Plug On Db2 Web Query for i
October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, that was a bit of a surprise, but to be fair we had a few days of forewarning about it before it happened so it really wasn’t. Yesterday, on October 10, IBM abruptly announced the end of marketing for all variations of the Db2 Web Query for i data analytics tool. You can read about it in announcement letter AD23-0691. But don’t get too excited. That announcement letter doesn’t tell you much.
On Friday, October 6, we got a message from a director of information technology at a logistics and business services provider that his IBM business partner …
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Four Hundred Monitor, October 11
October 11, 2023 Jenny Thomas
When it comes to AI, every day seems to bring some new potential catastrophe for humanity. Except today, because after saying AI would automate many back-office tasks and result in job loss for humans, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna now says it is not correct that increases in productivity have to lead to job losses. In fact, he believes AI will create more jobs that it will eliminate. In our Top Story below, Krishna explains IBM has plans to increase the number of software engineering and sales roles in the next three to four years. And then conceded there would be …
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Four Hundred Monitor, October 4
October 4, 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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New GUI, Native SMS Come to Kisco’s iEventMonitor
August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie
There’s a lot going on inside your IBM i server – too much for a single administrator to track it all, let alone do so in real-time. One product that helps automate IBM i monitoring is iEvent Monitor from Kisco Systems. With the recent release of version 7, the company has added a new GUI, support for native SMS messaging, and monitoring for SQL security certificate expirations and thread waits, among other new features.
Kisco Systems rolled out iEventMonitor back in 2015 as a budget-minded system monitoring tool for IBM i shops. Starting at just $400 for a single LPAR, …
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OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops
May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …
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The IT Balancing Act
May 1, 2023 Bill Langston
Medical research suggests that how well you can maintain your balance is a powerful predictor of your longevity. Balance is also a good indicator of longevity for your IBM i environment. The challenge is striking the right balance between “vertical” technology that helps your company work efficiently and accurately, and “horizontal” technology that reduces risk.
Over the past few years, unprecedented forces shifted IT priorities and may have knocked your company’s IBM i environment off balance.
Enabling IT Balance
IBM i exists because of how well it runs complex business applications and manages data. We take for granted that the …
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How IBM Improved Application Development with the Spring 2023 TRs
April 19, 2023 Alex Woodie
IBM i developers have a few exciting new features to look forward to with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, including a new release of RDi and new RPG and COBOL functions in the compilers.
As part of the Spring 2023 announcement for IBM i 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8, IBM last week unveiled a new release of Rational Developer for i (RDi), version 9.8, that brings new functionality to the Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE).
According to IBM’s announcement letter, RDi RPG and COBOL Tools Edition runs on
One of the new features with …
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Big Blue Refreshes The Technology for IBM i 7.4 And 7.5
April 12, 2023 Alex Woodie
As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, including version 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. These are relatively minor releases that bring incremental improvements to core areas of the platform, including IBM i Navigator, IWS, PowerHA, and RPG, among others. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the enhancements are undoubtedly just what many users need.
We’re going to dive into each of the enhancements and do full coverage of them in the coming weeks here at IT Jungle. For today, we’re going to provide a broad overview of the new stuff that IBM just announced this …
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Direct Attached Storage Gets Massive NVM-Express Expansion
April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The storage area network – a giant wonking storage server with lots of lossless Fibre Channel switching between servers that share access to virtual storage partitions – has been around for several decades now. And despite all of the talk of its ubiquity, and usefulness in driving up storage utilization across a bunch of servers and therefore helping drive down the cost of that storage while also enhancing its manageability and shareability, for many IBM i shops, using directly attached storage is what they want to do.
There are reasons for this, of course. In many cases, the IBM i …
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