• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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• Fall 2023 IBM i Tech Refresh Brings Something For Everyone

  October 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its fall Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i, with updates starting to become available on November 17. IBM announced no new products as part of the fall 2023 TR cycle, but it did spread the love around by giving just about everybody something to cheer about in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9.

  Lots of different products that make up the IBM i environment will see some pretty meaningful enhancements with this release. If you spend a lot of time in Navigator for i or ACS, you will see new stuff. We haven’t had …

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• Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Traditional system monitoring tools on IBM i are valuable, but they have one big downside: They often require an operator to sit there and stare at the screen to detect when things go wrong. “That gets old very quickly,” says Chris Hird, the Shield Advanced Solutions director who found an alternative approach in Nagios.

  Nagios is unique among monitoring tools – at least in the IBM i world – in that it actively runs checks for a variety of systems on monitored machines on a continuous basis. It is constantly pinging target server (and network and storage devices) to check …

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• IBM Bolsters New Nav With Job Scheduler And More

  April 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals finally can access the Advanced Job Scheduler from Navigator for i as a result of the new Technology Refreshes (TRs) that IBM unveiled on April 11. But the job scheduler is just one of a number of new capabilities that IBM is bringing to the snazzy new Web-based interface for administrators and power users, which Big Blue would very, very much like for you to use.

  When IBM debuted the new Navigator for i in the fall of 2021 with release of IBM i 7.3 TR11 and 7.4 TR5, it figured it had the luxury of time …

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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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• New Nav Makes Progress, But Still Not Caught Up with Old Nav

  October 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The Technology Refreshes have brought IBM closer to completing the transition to the new Navigator from the old Navigator product, which is susceptible to the Log4j security vulnerability. While the advances in IBM i 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7 will help customers, the new Navigator product will still not be at feature parity with old Nav when the plug is pulled on the heritage product at the end of the year.

  IBM has been encouraging its IBM i customer base to accelerate its adoption of the new Navigator, which debuted just over a year ago with the introduction of IBM …

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• IBM Bolsters Availability, Backup with Latest TRs

  October 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Nobody wants downtime or data loss, but companies’ appetite for both are on the decline as customers increasingly demand 24/7 service. IBM i shops have a lot of solutions to choose from when it comes to ensuring uptime and avoiding data loss, both of which have been enhanced with the latest round of Tech Refreshes (TRs) from IBM.

  IBM unveiled updates to its two flagship availability offerings for IBM i with the October 11 announcement of IBM i 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7, including Db2 Mirror and PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i. It also brought new features to Backup and …

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• IBM Unveils Fall 2022 Tech Refreshes for IBM i

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM yesterday announced Technology Refreshes for its two most current IBM i operating systems, including 7.5 and 7.4. Security continues to be a big driver of new functionality with 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. But the fall TRs bring a bevy of enhancements across all areas, including the database, IBM i services, open source, application development, and analytics, among others.

  Security has been the number one concern for CIOs for a few years now, and IBM has responded with a number of new features in IBM i. Some of the new security features exist in IBM i Navigator, the GUI …

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• Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.

  For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …

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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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