• 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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• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

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• Big Blue Moves Up Technology Refreshes For IBM i

  August 6, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We knew that IBM was getting ready to flesh out the Power9 server lineup with the “Cumulus” processors for scale-up systems, used in machines that span from four to 16 sockets in a single system image, and we told you all about that last week for an announcement that is expected to come to pass on August 7. This is fitting with all of the rumors we heard at the beginning of the year, which expected the big iron to come in the third quarter.

  Normally, we expect Technology Refresh updates for the current versions and releases of IBM i …

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• Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.

  IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …

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• IT Jungle Readers Respond To Tech Refreshes

  February 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM took some people in the IBM i community by surprise when it unveiled the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 two weeks ago. Support for new Power9 servers obviously headlines the news, but several other notable new features are worth mentioning. We asked IT Jungle readers to chime in on the parts they liked best.

  Birgitta Hauser, a developer with Toolmaker Advanced Efficiency in Germany, says she likes the productivity enhancements that TRs bring, and the latest TRs are no different.

  “Because I’m at first an IBM i programmer, with the main focus on RPG and …

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• Tooling Around With IBM i Access Client Solutions Announcements

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) received several feature/function enhancements when the Technology Refreshes were announced last week with a little something for end users, system administrators, and database engineers. Although nothing stands out as a major item, this is an incremental release fulfilling user-requested features.

  The 5250 emulator is a good example. It’s a key technology that is likely the most used component in ACS, but it’s been around for so long it’s easy to think there’s nothing new in emulation. But users never seem to cease to ask for something new: support for Chinese CCSID 1371 is one of those …

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• BRMS Cloud Backups Get Recovery Teeth

  February 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS) have been able to save their backups to the cloud for over a year. However, they faced restrictions when it came to restoring those backups to a system that wasn’t the originating server, which made the feature less useful in real-world disaster. Now IBM and its development partners are removing that restriction with the latest batch of IBM i tech refreshes.

  We touched on the new BRMS capability last week in our round-up story about IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 4 (TR4) and IBM i 7.2 TR8. …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

  October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.

  The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …

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• RDi Jumps Aboard The TR Train

  October 9, 2017 Dan Burger

  What is it going to take to convince IBM i developers that RDi, a modern Eclipse-based development environment with an impressive list of productivity enhancements, is a better development tool than the traditional green-screen tools that were designed decades ago? While IBM hasn’t upgraded the green-screen development tools in years, the investment in RDi continues. The latest Technology Refreshes, announced last week, embellished the list of productivity features RDi offers.

  Most IBM i shops that are using modern RPG coding techniques are familiar with RDi and the value of modernizing applications that are significant business assets. It is the organizations …

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