• The Shape Of The IBM To Come

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is getting ready to spin off its managed services businesses, which represents about a third of its revenue stream and a big chunk of its employee base, into the separate company called Kyndryl and hopes to have this task done by the end of the year. Last week, IBM’s top brass had a virtual meeting with Wall Street to host its Investor Day, and IBM’s chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, and the rest of the team unveiled a new segment and financial reporting structure that will be put into effect once the Kyndryl spinout is done.

  At that …

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• The Power S812 Gets Yet Another Stay Of Execution

  July 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power S812 entry server, which is based on the Power8 processor and which has no analog in the Power9-based Power Systems lineup, has received yet another reprieve from being removed from the Big Blue product catalog. It is a wonder why IBM doesn’t just say it will sell this Lazarus machine indefinitely and get it over with, to be honest.

  The Power S812, particularly the “Mini” variant that IBM announced on Valentine’s Day in 2017, are the skinniest – in terms of processing and memory capacity – of the Power Systems line that supports the IBM i operating …

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• Samba Patch Caps Busy Year for IBM i Security

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched a moderately severe security flaw in IBM i’s Samba implementation that could enable hackers to access data they really shouldn’t be able to access. The disclosure caps a rather busy second half of the year for security patches on IBM i that saw 26 emergency PTFs and Yum updates for Node.js, Python, the Apache HTTP Server, OpenSSL, ISC Bind, IBM Navigator, and even Db2 Mirror for IBM i.

  On November 26, IBM issued this security bulletin to let people know about the new flaw in the Samba client. The flaw could allow a hacker to not …

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• IBM i Marketing: Not A Thankless Job

  November 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For over one decade of the three that I called New York City my home, I was the president of the board of directors in the co-operative apartment building in which I lived. For many years, I ran a half rack of servers and storage in the kitchenette in our apartment to support IT Jungle’s website and subscription database, and I ran T1 lines up the outside of the building and in through the window. It was unconventional running a business that way, but there was no cloud computing as we know it, and certainly not at the prices you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 25

  June 24, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  First of all, Happy 31st Birthday to the AS/400, which had its anniversary on June 21 when, absolutely not coincidentally, Big Blue shipped the latest and greatest IBM i 7.4 release of its operating system for the Power Systems platform. We have all been eagerly awaiting this new release because of the many new features it has, and we are just beginning to sink our teeth into it.

  For your reference, I upgraded a system running IBM i 7.3 to IBM i 7.4 as soon as the new release was available, and just so you know, all the Java licensed …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 9

  March 4, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  This week, the new PTFs coming out of IBM are just for WebSphere Application Server 8.5, and only on IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3. There isn’t much going on otherwise, and this is a blessing, most definitely not a curse.

  I have added a bunch of new links to the spreadsheet that encompasses the IBM i PTF Guide, and these include:

  • IWS/IAS: How To Change the Ports Used by IBM IAS v8.5 and IWS v2.6 Servers
  • WireShark: Instructions for Collecting a Wireshark PC Sniffer Trace
  • AFP: Are AFP Utilities and AFP supported on IBM i 7.3?

  And …

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• IBM i Has Been Getting With The Program For Years

  February 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many things that one could constructively criticize IBM about when it comes to the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating system. But, in recent years at least, one of those things would not be – and could not be – that the company has not done enough to embrace the most important elements of the modern programming toolbox.

  In fact, the company has done and increasingly good job of embracing and extending the compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and models of the programming languages that have gone mainstream since Java first took the stage at the beginning of …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• IBM i Slated to Support Java 11

  July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but Java is in the midst of a major upheaval that will not change not only how the programming language is used by the wider world, but also how it’s used on the IBM i platform. For those running Java on the midrange platform, the forthcoming release of Java 11 is the one to watch.

  While Java has (sort of) been open source since Sun Microsystems released the object-oriented language into the world 27 years ago, it took much more solid steps toward being a true open source project last year when Oracle announced plans to release …

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• Q&A With IBM i’s AppDev Architect

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  During COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management at IBM, to talk about what’s going on with application development on the platform. Here’s an edited version of that conversation.

  IT Jungle: So what’s happening in IBM i application development? What’s new up there in Rochester?

  Tim Rowe: In between all sorts of fun development stuff that we got going on back in the lab, I spend quite a bit of time talking with customers. We continue to …

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