• Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.

  Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …

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• Guru: A Simple Script That Capitalizes on IBM i’s Open Source Capabilities

  April 26, 2021 Rob McNelly

  In my last piece, we got Yum and Bash running on IBM i. Now let’s build on that foundation to find an open campsite.

  I’m serious. Recently I used an IBM i LPAR to schedule a hiking and camping trip to the Grand Canyon. Where to begin? My bio, perhaps. Here it’s mentioned that “Rob enjoys camping, hiking, biking, and backpacking through the mountains of Arizona. . . . His favorite trip was hiking to the blue waters of Havasupai, and he is planning on hiking the Grand Canyon in the near future.”

  So last summer I went …

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• Guru: For IBM i Newcomers, An Access Client Solutions Primer

  March 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  I enjoy reading about IBM i Fresh Faces. Sure, it’s refreshing to see that it’s not just graybeards like me who are working on the platform, but what really matters is that young people are learning about, getting hands-on with, and coming to love IBM i. I appreciate that many of these stories revolve around system/application modernization and open source solutions. This gives newcomers to IBM i a degree of comfort by reducing their learning curve.

  Learning any new technology is challenging. Specifically, how do you go from learning about the concepts to actually getting on a machine and …

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• iTech Solutions Keeps You In The Know With VERIFi

  February 22, 2021 Alex Woodie

  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That time-tested bit of advice from Ben Franklin has many applications, including, it turns out, IBM i systems management. And through its new VERIFi offering, iTech Solutions is set to provide many ounces of prevention by keeping customers on top of what is happening with their IBM i servers.

  iTech Solutions’ VERIFi comes in three flavors. With VERIFi Weekly Status Reporting, the company remotely monitors key aspects of IBM i server health and summarize those findings in a PDF sent once a week for $295 per year. It offers …

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• Power Systems Security: More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

  February 17, 2021 Tony Perera

  The IBM i platform is no longer an island unto itself. In many companies, there is a diversity of different systems — Unix systems, Linux servers, and Windows environments, not to mention IBM i. Each of these environments brings its own strength and weakness. The goal is to not let these differences hurt something that’s important to you: security.

  Make no mistake: It’s a good thing that Power Systems servers can run multiple operating systems. From an IBM i perspective, it ensures more R&D dollars from IBM to support the hardware. It seems doubtful IBM would spend billions to develop …

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• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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• You Can’t Just Keep Doing What You Have Always Done

  November 30, 2020 Rob McNelly

  There are philosophical differences that exist between people regarding the best ways to configure, manage, and maintain infrastructure, and this holds as true for infrastructure built around IBM i as it is for other kinds of platforms. The easiest and fastest thing to do – and what makes the most sense according to plenty of people – is to do what they have always done. Just keep replicating the past out into the future to infinity.

  Others point out that this mindset stifles progress and ignores all of the innovations that have come to the IBM i platform through the …

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• Connectria Bringing IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that want greater integration between their IBM i and cloud systems may be interested in a new offering unveiled yesterday by Connectria. In January, the private cloud company is planning to launch a new hybrid cloud offering that delivers a low latency connection between its hosted IBM i environments and AWS data centers located on the East and West coasts.

  Connectria says its new hybrid cloud offering provides an “ultra-low latency direct connection” between its IBM i and AIX resources and Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions. With just 2 milliseconds of latency between Connectria’s Power Systems …

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• Profound and Connectria Hook Up in Cloud-Modernization Push

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i modernization tool provider Profound Logic and Connectria, one of the biggest private cloud providers for IBM i, announced a strategic partnership last week. The goal of the union, representatives with both companies say, is to give their respective IBM i customers a leg up as they seek to streamline their IT systems.

  Matt Biegacki, the vice president and chief marketing officer for Connectria, and Michael Killian, the vice president of strategic accounts for Profound Logic, shared their thoughts on the partnership during a call with IT Jungle this week.

  From Profound Logic’s perspective, the partnership with …

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• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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