• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• Happy Holidays To You And Yours From Us And Ours

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, thank you.

  It is a great privilege and an honor to do the work we do for the IBM i and Power Systems customer base and the software vendors, hardware sellers, and service providers who also serve customers like you. If history has demonstrated nothing else in the more than five decades of IBM midrange computing, it is that we are one single ecosystem, that we are all in this together and always have been.

  We did a little bit more content earlier this year, and so that means we can get our Christmas break a little …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 50

  December 11, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there are two new security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. And there is also an update to the System Planning Tool. Let’s do the latter first and the former last.

  The System Planning Tool, version 6.23.340, is now available for download at this link. The System Planning Tool is used by customers and business partners to build valid system configurations for Power Systems machines and their software stacks. You can look at the release notes for various SPT generations here.

  Now on to the …

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• IBM i Momma Bear Retires

  December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Alison Butterill is probably the most famous IBM i visage in the world. For as long as we can remember – which is not necessarily any kind of test we realize – Butterill has been front and center, calming and thoroughly explaining the IBM i platform, being the interface between customers and engineers steering its development, and being its official spokesperson alongside of IBM i chief architect Steve Will.

  We are sad to report that Butterill retired as worldwide IBM i offering manager from Big Blue on November 30. And in a manner that is absolutely consistent with her calm …

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• AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play

  November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.

  While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 46

  November 13, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  There’s a bunch of stuff going on this week in IBM i PTF Land. So let’s just get to it.

  First, we have a security vulnerability, which you can find out more about in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable due to a flaw in Samba which could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions (CVE-2023-4091), located at this link. The issues can be fixed by applying a PTF to IBM i. IBM i releases 7.4, 7.3, and 7.2 will be fixed. The IBM i PTF number for 5770-SS1 contains the fix for the vulnerability.

  IBM i Release	5770-SS1 

  …

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• Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks

  November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.

  In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …

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• Last Chance To Be A Part Of The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  November 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Soon, Forta will close out its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, so now is your last chance to participate and help us all better understand what is going on in the IBM i on Power Systems community.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power Systems in any kind of detail …

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• Power Systems Still Climbing Despite This Weird Economy

  October 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, IBM used to talk about System z, Power Systems, and storage as separate things because they are, largely, separate things. Even if customers of the mainframe and Power platforms sometimes buy IBM storage for their machines, and even if some of that storage is actually based on Power platforms themselves.

  But to be able to brag about the System z business every quarter and to make the rest of its Infrastructure group look like a bigger thing, Big Blue merged its Power Systems and Storage divisions into something it has called Distributed Systems for the …

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• What IBM i Shops Are Thinking About Right Now

  October 30, 2023 Ron Venzin

  If you listen to the national and global media, it is hard to figure out what is really going on in the world at the strategic and tactical levels of individual companies. The global happenings are like climate trends, but each company generates its own weather and reacts to the weather generated by the customers and competitors in its own market. Or markets, as the case may be.

  Because we all live in the weather as we are trying to keep an eye on the climate – people really do talk about the economic climate but no one talks about …

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