• IBM Bolsters Database Security with Guardium 12.0

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the Guardium database security software is expected to help customers detect insider threats faster and better comply with audit mandates, according to IBM. Guardium 12.0 also brings expanded support for databases and easier management in hybrid cloud environments, the company says.

  IBM bought Guardium back in 2009 in order to improve its capability to monitor databases for possible security violations and SQL injection attacks. The security software helped to automate database security tasks by implementing a policy-based control layer for transactions as well as anomaly detection routines to single out potentially criminal behavior that would otherwise …

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• Rocket Buys Data Integration Provider B.O.S.

  September 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has announced the acquisition of B.O.S., a German provider of data integration software. While the software company targets primarily the mainframe with its data integration solutions, Rocket says it’s considering broadening support to IBM i.

  B.O.S. was founded more than 30 years ago to develop data integration solutions that connect the IBM mainframe to other systems. It boasts more than 1,200 installations in 25 countries, including Fortune 50 firms as well as government organizations.

  The company’s flagship product, called tcVision, helps customers move data from their mainframe sources, such as Db2, IMS, VSAM files, ADABAS, and CA DATACOM, …

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• FNTS Launches Managed Services for Power Servers in IBM Cloud

  May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Have a Power server running in IBM Cloud but want someone else to provide the care and feeding? Then you might be interested in the new service unveiled by longtime IBM business partner FNTS to manage customers’ Power environments running in the IBM Cloud.

  FNTS is an Omaha, Nebraska, outfit that has been sailing the IBM i and mainframe seas for many years. The company, which previously went by the name First National Technology Solutions, was the IT branch of a former bank, First National of Nebraska Inc., that was spun out to providing hosting services more than 25 years …

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• OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops

  May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …

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• Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance

  April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.

  PerfScan is the first product – and …

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• You Ought To Be Committed

  March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a phrase that we learn as teenagers, concomitant with the kinds of peer pressure that close friends can bring to bear early in our lives to nudge us, that applies in an inverse way to a portion of the IBM i customer base, or probably more precisely, to the upper management at a portion of the company that thinks – erroneously – that getting off the IBM i platform is somehow going to magically fix their particular IT problems.

  All talk and no action.

  Don’t get us wrong. We are not trying to get people to move off …

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• AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

  February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

  And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …

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• Realizing The Promise Of Cross Platform Development With VS Code

  January 25, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  An integrated development environment is like a tractor or a truck, or indeed any other kind of tool. There are farmers who want a tractor from John Deere or Ford or Massey-Ferguson, contractors who want a Ford or Dodge or GMC truck, and carpenters and electricians who use Dewalt or Milwaukee Electric or Makita cordless tools.

  No matter the choice of tools, ultimately these blue collar workers are going to farm and build things, and the choice of tool should not interfere with that effort. White collar – or far more likely no collar T shirt – programmers are no …

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• IBM To Stop Unencrypted Fix Downloads In February

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have caught word from the IBM business partner community that starting on February 15, 2023, Big Blue will stop allowing customers to get operating system software patches that are not encrypted.

  The notification, which you can see here, was sent to business partners on November 23, just before the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. Various IBM support methods, including IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD), IBM Electronic Customer Care (ECC), and IBM Fix Central are all affected by this change.

  “Many leaders of the internet industry – such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task …

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• Pandora FMS Log Monitoring Solution Gets IBM i Hooks

  September 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Pandora FMS, an open source log monitoring solution that has been in use for decades, is being integrated with IBM i, the software’s commercial backer announced last week. Thanks to a partnership between Pandora FMS and the French company M81, organizations that use the software can add IBM i into the monitoring mix.

  Pandora FMS, short for Flexible Monitoring System, is an open source tool for consuming and analyzing server and network logs. The utility, which was written in PHP and runs on Linux, uses agents (developed in Perl) to keep an eye on servers running Linux, Windows, and Unix …

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