• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Mono Comes to RPM, Making .NET on IBM i Even Easier

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Here’s some good news for IBM i developers who want to develop using Microsoft’s .NET framework and tools: the Mono runtime for IBM i is now available via the RPM and Yum open source delivery method. Delivering Mono this way should make it even easier for IBM i developers to take advantage of the popular .NET tooling and runtime.

  Jesse Gorzinski, IBM‘s business architect of open source technologies, broke the news on Thanksgiving Day. “#IBMi users have something to be thankful for today: .NET in RPM form! Yes, you can ‘yum install’ mono now, from @friedkiwi’s repo!!” Gorzinski wrote …

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• Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

  November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

  Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• New Open Source ERP Suite Written In ILE RPG

  October 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  There’s something quite novel being introduced today at the Fall COMMON conference in Pittsburgh: An open source ERP package written in free-form RPG. Dubbed intERPprise, the software project is intended to harness core IBM i strengths – its integrated database and ILE environment – but above all, provide an example for what modern and native open source software can look like on IBM i.

  The intERPrise project (www.i-nterprise.org) was spearheaded by a group of IBM i advocates, including Chris Hird and Marinus van Sandwyk, who wanted to demonstrate what a modern business application would look like – and …

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• Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

  The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …

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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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