• The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of

  August 25, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.

  This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …

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• Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

  August 25, 2025 Ash Giddings

  When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

  It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

  According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past …

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• Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

  ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

  IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

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• New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

  The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 33

  August 25, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It might be a good and convenient thing that the WebSphere Application Server, the Web server embedded in the IBM i platform two and a half decades ago and making it part of the Internet, is based on the open source Apache Web server. But it sure does have a lot of patches. The good news is that because it is open source, it is patched regularly and problems do not fester in obscurity.

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there are a slew of security vulnerabilities related to WebSphere, as there sometimes is. Let’s walk through them all. …

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• Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.

  Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration …

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• IBM To Add Full System Replication And FlashCopy To PowerHA

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM will be adding a pair of new technologies to PowerHA SystemMirror in the near future, including Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC). The technologies are currently offered through the PowerHA Tools group of products via IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services), but will become part of the mainstream PowerHA offering soon.

  FSR and FSFC have been available for years via IBM Expert Labs toolkits, where they have provided IBM i shops with additional forms of data and application protection above and beyond what they get with BRMS and PowerHA, both of which are still required with …

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• Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

  August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

  A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

  Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.

  01 **Free
  02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');
  
  03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
  05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);
  
  07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
  08 string_UTF8 = 

  … Read more

• The Price Tweaking Continues For Power Systems

  August 18, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I have said it before and I will say it again: If you think you can keep track of IBM’s pricing for hardware, software, and services given all the ups and downs with pricing, you have a better encyclopedic mind and spreadsheet than we do.

  In recent weeks, Big Blue has been at it again with the red grease pencil, making changes in the Power Systems and Storage hardware product lines. Both of the price changes we report on today actually were announced in early July and took effect immediately. They were buried in our torrent of email and I …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 31 And 32

  August 18, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are finally getting back to the normal cadence for the IBM i PTF Guide by doubling up editions to get everything current. Our apologies for the asynchronous delays, which were caused by vacations that we actually took here at IT Jungle for once.

  Number 30 of the Guide was put together on August 2. There were two security vulnerabilities to cope with.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected by arbitrary code execution (CVE-2025-36038), with more information at this link. Affected products include IBM WebSphere Application Server 8.5 and 9.0.

  Second, we have Security …

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• You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

  Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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• Price Cut On Power S1012 Mini Since Power S1112 Ain’t Coming Until 2026

  August 11, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We told you a few weeks ago that Big Blue was not planning on putting a kicker to the Power S1012 entry server, what we call a “mini” machine due to its diminutive physical size and capacity, based on a Power11 chip into the field until sometime in early 2026. That leaves customers looking for a machine with a one or two cores and with a desire to stay in a P05 IBM i software tier a bit in a lurch.

  So, on August 5, while we are away on vacation in the woods and lakes of upper Michigan, IBM …

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• IBM i: Pro and Con

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Everybody has an opinion, and it seems that many people these days feel the need to share those opinions, for better or worse. When it comes to IBM i, the volume of sentiments may be lower than, say, the activities of tech CEOs at Coldplay concerts. However, the proprietary server still elicits thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, as evidenced by reviews recently shared by the IT marketplace known as G2.

  G2 was founded back in 2012 with a simple goal: Provide actionable, crowdsourced information on enterprise IT software and gear, without requiring customers to shell out tens of …

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• As I See It: Disruption

  August 11, 2025 Victor Rozek

  There was a time, not so long ago, that pursuing a degree in Computer Science would all but guarantee a good job and the opportunity for a thriving career. Tech was booming and hungry for talent. Like sporting franchises competing for players, some companies even offered inducements in the form of signing bonuses. Early in my career I was offered a signing bonus large enough to buy a new convertible. No negotiation necessary, it was simply part of the benefits package.

  But the industry has changed and career IT jobs are becoming hard to find and harder to keep. Tech …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 30

  August 11, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are still a little bit out of phase with holidays and vacations and playing some catch up with the IBM i PTF Guide. In Number 30, which was put together on July 26, there were a slew of issues and things, starting with three security vulnerabilities.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by errors in OpenSSL as part of IBM Portable Utilities for i due to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can find out more about here. The issues can be fixed by applying PTFs to IBM i.  IBM i 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, and …

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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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• How IBM i Users Can Compete In The Digital Era With Composable Commerce

  July 28, 2025 Nichole Ballesteros

  The recently launched LANSA Composable Commerce offers IBM i users a way to keep pace with rapidly evolving e-commerce demands while maintaining their trusted backend systems. Read on to explore this new solution from the modernization experts at LANSA.

  IBM i has long been the backbone of critical business applications. It holds decades of proven business logic and accurate data to manage everything from inventory and pricing to order processing and fulfillment. When companies first expanded into e-commerce, LANSA made it possible to extend this stability and intelligence to the web. With LANSA Commerce Edition, storefronts are integrated seamlessly …

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• IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

  IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

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• Profound Logic Adds MCP To IBM i AI Tool

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The world of AI is moving extremely fast right now, with new models, techniques, and technologies emerging every week. One of the newest bits of AI tech to catch on is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has quickly become a defacto standard for connecting data sources to AI models. Profound Logic, which has been on the cutting edge of AI, is the first IBM i vendor to bring MCP support to the server and the Db2 for i database.

  Anthropic quietly launched Model Context Protocol in late November 2024 as a way to enable large language models (LLMs), such …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 29

  July 28, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to the IBM i PTF Guide. This week, we start out with two security vulnerabilities having to do with the WebSphere application server and an issue with the Java programming runtime.

  Let’s start with the security issues.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Liberty are affected by a security bypass vulnerability (CVE-2024-56339), which you can find out more about at this link. The affected products are IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty 17.0.0.3 through 25.0.0.7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server 9.0.

  Second, we have PH67183: IBM WebSphere Liberty is affected by …

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