• You Are Much More Than Power Systems, And So Are We

  April 13, 2026 Doug McMaster

  The AS/400 was born in the age of minicomputers, but that was also when the rise of the personal computer started and eventually led to the revolution of client/server distributed computing. Not only was computing shifted to the PCs on our desks, but also out to file servers, print servers, and application servers that ran all kinds of different platforms, including NetWare, SCO Unix, OS/2 Server, rarely a variant of Unix, what would become Windows Server, and more recently Linux.

  Eventually, Windows Server and Linux became not only Web infrastructure and application serving platforms but ran relational databases and sometimes …

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• The Turning Point For Power Systems Is Here, And Now

  July 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CORRECTED Considering how everyone in the IBM midrange systems market knew that Power11 processors and the next generation of Power Systems servers using them were coming some time around the middle of this year, the dip in Power Systems servers based on Power10 technology did pretty well, we think, in the first quarter and now the second quarter.

  We have to infer this, of course, because Big Blue does not provide revenue figures for sales of Power Systems iron, much less give a breakdown by sales of machines running IBM i, AIX, or Linux as their primary operating system. What …

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• Vendors Fill In The Gaps With IBM’s New MFA Solution

  July 14, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The new multi-factor authentication (MFA) capability that IBM has built into the IBM i operating system is a real gamechanger in terms of securing the system and preventing unauthorized access to applications and data. However, it lacks some key capabilities that some customers are looking for in an MFA solution, which third-party vendors are eager to fill.

  The native MFA function that Big Blue delivered with IBM i 7.6 is being praised almost universally throughout the IBM i community as a massive security improvement. The MFA functionality, which uses randomly generated time-based one-time passwords (TOTP), is built directly into …

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• Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

  April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.

  There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …

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• Need Data Off An Old Tape? The Backup Crackers Can Help

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  What happens when you need data from an old backup tape, but no longer have the vintage IBM hardware it was backed up from, let alone a subscription to the application it was created from nor the backup software it was created with? If you find yourself in such a predicament, the folks at S2|Data would like to hear from you.

  “We are backup software format crackers,” says Brendan Sullivan, the founder and chief executive officer of S2|Data. “What we do is we look at the media, which might be tape or it might be disk, and we figure …

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• Rocket Consolidates Half a Dozen Terminal Emulators With Secure Host Access

  February 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has rolled out Secure Host Access, a new terminal emulator for utilizing the classic greenscreen interfaces of heritage IBM i, mainframe, and Unix applications. The new offering consolidates multiple emulators acquired by Rocket over the years into a single offering, while delivering much-needed security features that the previous emulators largely lacked.

  Rocket Software’s Secure Host Access is a terminal emulator that provides a full array of TN5250, TS3270, and VT connectivity from PCs, Web browsers, and mobile devices. The Java-based product offers all the features and capabilities that you would expect to find in a mature emulator, …

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• Security Top of Mind as Massive Hacks Continue

  December 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The calendar indicates peace and joy, but instead a sense of dread and fear permeates business, as the number and scope of security breaches grows and new regulations loom on the horizon. Ransomware, in particular, is proving itself to be a thorny issue for companies of all sizes, including IBM i shops.

  The latest mega-hack involved Chinse state actors infiltrating the American telecommunications backbone, where they not only accessed huge numbers of call detail records (CDRs) – which they used for counter-espionage purposes – but also read text messages and listened to Americans’ phone calls.

  Known as Salt Typhoon, the …

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• Inside Avatier’s Goals to Modernize Identity Management

  September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie

  When Nelson Cicchitto founded Avatier back in 1997, the company focused on providing identity management and access for a single platform: Windows NT. Nearly three decades later, the company’s core goals around enabling identity management and access haven’t changed, but the its platform reach and technical capabilities certainly have grown, as Cicchitto said in an exclusive IT Jungle interview.

  You may not have heard much about Avatier, the small Pleasanton, California-based developer of identity and access management solutions that’s been quietly building a base of 500 customers around the world. As far as IBM i vendors goes, the company …

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• Precisely Streams IBM i Data Into Amazon’s New Db2 Service

  April 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Amid the torrent of news that Amazon Web Services unveiled at its re:Invent show four months ago was RDS for Db2, a new hosted relational data service based on IBM’s database. Amazon Web Services offers the Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) variant of Db2, but thanks to a new connector unveiled by Precisely last week, IBM i and mainframe shops have a way to replicate their data into it.

  Amazon RDS is among the cloud giant’s most popular services, and likely one of the most popular IT services ever created. According to one estimate, Amazon RDS brings in $7 billion …

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• The Long And IBM i Road That Leads To Your Door

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the System/36 in 1983 or the AS/400 in 1988. No matter which line you want to draw, that is a long time for a continuously upgradable and upgraded operating system and database platform combination and its underlying hardware.

  Not only do the predecessors of the IBM …

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