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Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …
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Is It Time To Rename RPG?

August 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

Should IBM rename RPG, and if so, what should the new name be? It’s an interesting idea, and one that was recently floated by a member of the IBM i community, who submitted an official request for enhancement (RFE) on the matter. The crux of the argument is that full free-format RPG is such a dramatic departure from fixed-format RPG that it deserves a new name. But will IBM, which owns the language, go along with the change?

Report Program Generator, or RPG, debuted way back in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, as a way to replicate …
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Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms

October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is no shortage of IBM i shops that are sitting on back releases of the operating system and related systems software, or older Power Systems iron, or both. Sometimes, it takes a little convincing to get upper management to listen about how IT operations could be improved and extended if the company would only make some investments in upgrading the hardware and systems software. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, particularly when many small and medium businesses are run by their owners and in a certain sense any money that would be allocated for an upgrade is their …
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IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

First of …
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Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …
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More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i

July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

Open source may be the future of IBM i. It certainly seems that way at the moment. But if open source is going to soar to new heights on the platform, it will need better integration with the existing processes in place to monitor and manage the platform.

That’s the opinion of JK Grafe, the CEO of Quad Nova Group, a Jacksonville, Florida-based IBM i consultancy that has offices up the Eastern Seaboard. By Grafe’s own admission, open source is a great thing for the platform. But the difficulty in seeing what’s actually going on with open source workloads …
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The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.

This is not a bad thing. …
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Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

Is It Time To Rename RPG?

Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms

IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i

The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

Content archive

Recent Posts

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