• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

  Read more

• Quantum And Atempo Offer Joint Backup Solution

  October 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  An expanded partnership between Atempo and Quantum will see the two vendors go to market with pre-integrated solution that combines Quantum’s storage hardware along with Atempo’s backup software.

  The new bundles, which were unveiled in late September, take two forms. The first combines a Quantum media server and a Quantum DXi V5000 virtual backup appliance with Tina, the name of Atempo’s backup software. This solution is targeted at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that need 80 TB or less of raw backup capacity.

  The second bundle, which targets enterprises, combines Tina running on a Quantum media server, along with …

  Read more

• Cleo and SrinSoft in Integration-Modernization Link Up

  August 3, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Modernization is a hot topic among organizations that run ERP and industry-specific applications on mature platforms, like the IBM i. But other parts of the stack need modernizing too, including the integration layer, which is the subject of a new partnership between integration software provider Cleo and SrinSoft.

  Cleo provides a range of data and application integration solutions as part of its Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) offering, which connects to backend IBM i systems. The Rockford, Illinois-based company supports API, EDI (AS2), and file-based integration methods via CIC, which is available in Express, Essentials, Business, and Premium versions.

  SrinSoft, …

  Read more

• Getting A Firm Handle On Power Systems And Storage Firmware

  June 15, 2022 Richard Warren

  Back in the old days of the AS/400 and the iSeries, most customers had a single box or maybe two, one for production applications and databases and one for development of high availability. And everything that box needed was inside of itself.

  And at most, you applied two kinds of PTFs – those for the operating system and those for the microcode – to the machine, and you did that maybe once or twice a year and every once in a while you might add some group PTFs to update security or other important features.

  But the world has changed …

  Read more

• IBM Delivers More Out-of-the-Box Security with IBM i 7.5

  May 11, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s often said that IBM i is one of the most securable server platforms on the market. But all too often, customers don’t take the time to properly configure it, leaving their applications and data at risk. With IBM i 7.5, IBM is taking aim at security and delivering a system that is more secure when it ships from the factory.

  From default settings to the elimination of some options, IBM has taken several steps to make IBM i more secure by default. IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury, a former security IBM architect for OS/400 and now the co-founder …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: The Real Top 5 Challenges For IBM i Shops Today

  May 9, 2022 Christine McDowell

  The only way to really find out what is on people’s minds is to ask them, and maybe you need to ask them two or three times and take an average. As a supplier of development, modernization, and security tools and services, we ask a lot of questions and we do a lot of assessments for IBM i customers, and we look at any and all surveys that anyone does and synthesize this to help drive our business.

  We have been through a series of surveys of our own as well as ones that we have helped promote or sponsored …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

  Read more

• Inside Jack Henry’s Long-Term Modernization Roadmap

  March 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates is one of the stalwart brands for IBM i applications. The Monett, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 banks and credit unions running its core banking systems on IBM i, with another 650 on AIX and a few hundred more on Windows Server. So when the company last month officially unveiled its next-generation technology strategy, it turned a few heads.

  As it turns out, Jack Henry has been working on its new tech stack for the past five years. As the company sussed out the strategy and the first products were born – an application for …

  Read more

Previous Articles