• Future-Proof Your Data Strategy With LANSA BI

  July 22, 2024 Stephen Strake

  Last October, with no warning at all, IBM suddenly pulled the plug on its Db2 Web Query business intelligence tool for the IBM i platform. This left a lot of customers in the lurch, since Db2 Web Query is based on but very different from the WebFOCUS business intelligence tool from Information Builders.

  IBM and Information Builders, we later learned, could not come to terms on how to re-license the WebFOCUS engine at the heart of Db2 Web Query, and thus far, IBM has not provided an alternative BI platform or a migration tool for any third-party applications.

  The upshot …

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• Xorux Is Gaining Traction With LPAR2RRD System Monitoring

  July 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  System monitoring and management is a lot more complicated these days than it was back in the early days of the AS/400 or even the middle years of the iSeries. To start, there are physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual storage, and physical and virtual networking to deal with, and finding a tool – or a set of integrated tools – that can do that, and do it across disparate and incompatible platforms, is a big ask.

  But a little known software company called Xorux, which is based in Prague in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, actually …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012

  May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.

  Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …

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• IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

  May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

  Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …

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• ZendHQ Now Runs Fully on IBM i

  April 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops running the ZendPHP distribution of the open source programming language and runtime will be interested to know that Perforce Software recently added full support for IBM i with ZendHQ, the extension for ZendPHP that provides observability and orchestration functionality for PHP-based applications. Previously, IBM i shops had to run part of ZendHQ on Linux or Windows.

  Perforce Software originally launched ZendHQ back in June 2022 to give ZendPHP customers more visibility and control of their increasingly complex PHP environments. ZendHQ is a superset of functionality that bundles existing tools that were originally developed for Zend Server customers, …

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• Precisely Streams IBM i Data Into Amazon’s New Db2 Service

  April 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Amid the torrent of news that Amazon Web Services unveiled at its re:Invent show four months ago was RDS for Db2, a new hosted relational data service based on IBM’s database. Amazon Web Services offers the Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) variant of Db2, but thanks to a new connector unveiled by Precisely last week, IBM i and mainframe shops have a way to replicate their data into it.

  Amazon RDS is among the cloud giant’s most popular services, and likely one of the most popular IT services ever created. According to one estimate, Amazon RDS brings in $7 billion …

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• The Low Down On Service Extension For IBM i 7.X Releases

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of our discussion two weeks ago of the long-lived releases of IBM i and OS/400 and how they compare in terms of technical support and bug fix coverage to Linux and Windows Server, we got a bunch of questions about just when the service extension – what we call extended support like other operating system vendors – would end.

  We understood the very high price that customers pay for service extension – as brilliantly outlined in a piece by Steve Pitcher back in October 2023, which showed the high price that the cumulative cost stacks up …

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• Yet More Announcements On IBM i Software Subscriptions

  March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past two years, Big Blue has done of lot of things to repackage the IBM i software stack, and even its entry Power Systems machinery, to be consistent with the modern world of utility pricing for IT systems. Many are not thrilled by this, of course, and not just because they are resistant to change. While IBM is bundling in many features and add-ons to the stack for free as it shifts to subscriptions, the core IBM i subscriptions are without question more expensive than buying a perpetual license and paying Software Maintenance over a five, six, or …

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• Raz-Lee Adds Zero-Trust Features To IBM i Firewall

  March 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to implement a zero-trust security posture in their IBM i systems may want to check out Raz-Lee Security. The software company has added micro-segmentation capability to its iSecurity Firewall product, giving IBM i shops another level of control over their networks.

  Zero-trust is one of the more promising methods to secure an internal network these days, as it requires users to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before being granted access to internal applications or data. It has been widely adopted in corporate networks as one aspect of a strong defense, particularly in Windows …

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• Sundry IBM Tape Subsystem Announcements

  March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been shipping tape drives and tape libraries based on LTO-9 tape cartridge technology for nearly three years, which is why we think it is odd that last week we saw that the TS2290 machine now has a feature code to attach to IBM i or OS/400 systems.

  In announcement letter AD24-0463, which is pretty terse as these things go, we see that there is a new feature code 9400 for the TS2290 tape drive, also known as the 3580 Model H9S. This appears to be just a feature code to allow for direct attachment of the TS2290 …

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