• 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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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 15

  April 10, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  It is Spring Break in a lot of places, and also Easter and Passover as we go to press, and so it is not at all surprising that there is not a lot of activity in the IBM i PTF Guide this week. We took the opportunity to retire 7.2 worksheet, check the archives, and, DLB_PTF_04/01/23_B25N14.XLS for the last worksheet. Any changes to V7R2 going forward will be detailed here instead of the Guide.

  There are High Impact/Pervasive tweaks for all currently supported releases – IBM i 7.5, IBM i 7.4, and IBM i 7.3 – and a fix list …

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• Domino Runs on IBM i 7.5, But HCL Still Working on Power10

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use Domino to serve email and drive other forms of communication will be happy to know they can run Domino 12.2 on IBM i 7.5. However, if they want to run the setup on a Power10 server, they will need to wait a little longer for HCL to support it.

  Back in 2017, HCL Technologies took over development and maintenance of the Domino and Notes product line from IBM. Two years later, the India-based tech firm pushed out version 10 of Domino and Notes and related products (like Sametime, Traveler, and Verse), the first major …

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• IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.

  As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …

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• IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i developers can now debug their code in a development environment other than Rational Developer for IBM i or Merlin. The news came last week, when Liam Allan announced that the ILE debugging feature is now available in Code for IBM i, his third-party, IBM i-centric plug-in for Visual Studio Code.

  “Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day!” Allan tweeted from his @Notesofbarry Twitter account. “I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.”

  Indeed, this day has been a long time in coming. Allan, who has not been shy about sharing his dislike …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 2

  January 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Two thousand twenty-three is shaping up to be a transition year of sorts in the IBM i community, with midrange Power10 servers hitting the market, IBM i 7.3 (finally) meeting its end, and an economic recession looming. We tapped our network of IBM i prognosticators to help fill in the particulars with part two in this annual series.

  There’s been a security awakening in the IBM i community, and Robin Tatam, director of security technologies with Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), sees that translating into greater security controls as threats to the IBM i proliferate in 2023.

  “The IBM i community is …

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• Multiple Vulnerabilities Pop Up In Navigator For i

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Why do we network computers again? Remind me.

  A new security bulletin was released for the Navigator for i system management interface for the IBM i platform on January 18, which rolls up four different vulnerabilities for Navigator for i that leave it open to log file access, to obtaining file attributes, and to SQL Injection attacks due to multiple other vulnerabilities.

  You can read about this security bulletin at this link. The most severe of the issues is the SQL injection attack, which has a CVSS Base score of 6.3 out of 10. According to the bulletin: “IBM …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year In Review: Part 2

  December 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  In part one of this now annual recap of the IBM i world that we do here at IT Jungle, we reminisced on the biggest stories of the first six months of the year. There was quite a bit going on, with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and more. But getting into the last half of the year – now that’s where the real action began.

  July

  The first full month of summer started off with a bang when IBM, after much anticipation, unveiled the long-awaited scale-out Power10 machines. The Power10 rollout included the S1014, with …

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• OK, This Really Is The Last Of Power Systems Announcements For 2022

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are winding down for 2022, and you are very likely doing the same. There are a few more things we need to go over to close out the year.

  In announcement 122-127, from December 13, IBM has announced that its IBM i subscription offering, which is paired with the subscription-priced Power S1014 that was hinted at during the July announcements and fully fleshed out in September.

  With the changes, IBM is delivering three year and five year terms for initial subscription contracts, complementing the one year and four year contracts that were initially available. These three-year and five-year …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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