• Big Blue Unveils Spring 2021 IBM i Technology Refreshes

  April 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM tomorrow will announce the latest round of Technology Refreshes (TRs) for the current versions of the operating systems. With IBM i 7.4 TR4 and 7.3 TR10, IBM is focusing its efforts on extending automation across various components of the operating system, including the database, security, and high availability. But a surprise also awaits IBM i enthusiasts who are visually inclined.

  IBM gave IT Jungle a preview of the announcements that will go public tomorrow, and (very kindly) gave us permission to cover them in today’s issue of The Four Hundred. That means that the announcement materials will not …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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• Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

  The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

  The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …

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• How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

  November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.

  Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …

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• Cloud Walkers Updates IBM i Partition Manager, Slashes Prices

  November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All over the world, a lot of things are taking a bit longer to get done these days thanks to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But things are still getting done, and that is the main thing. So it is with Bartlomiej Grabowski, the founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Walkers, the startup based in Prague in the Czech Republic who released a tool called LPARKit, which we covered at its V1 release back in December 2019.

  The plan, Grabowski tells The Four Hundred, was to take all of the input from the V1 users …

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• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 27

  July 14, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to the second half of 2020 after a brief holiday hiatus from The Four Hundred and therefore the IBM i PTF Guide.

  There is another new HIPER for the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS, which again we know all of you IBM i shops love dearly. The HIPER is IJ25390, and it is for slow TCP performance with the Virtual Ethernet adapter and large send. Here is some more on that LSO – short for large send offload – and specifically a link that explains it better than we did two weeks ago, plus another link to a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 26

  July 6, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Well, we made it through half of 2020, and that is something of a miracle. Let’s hope the second half is not so dramatic. The odds are not favoring that at the moment, but hope springs eternal and that is how we have made it through the past 15,000 years of pre-history to today, if you think about it. It’s helpful to take the long view at critical times.

  As far as PTFs go, there is a new HIPER for the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS, which we know all you IBM i shops love. The HIPER is IJ25390, and …

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• IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn

  May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …

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