Two weeks ago, concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.3, Big Blue announced a slew of new flash storage drives and storage controllers, which we told you about based on the announcement letters as we normally do. Since that time, we have got our hands on some internal analysis that IBM has done for Power Systems partners and customers, and are sharing that with you to help in your buying decisions as you contemplate adding flash to your systems or, perhaps, even going all flash.

Enterprises are doing it, now that the price for effective capacity after data compression

Security threats–data breaches with bruising economic consequences that are triggered from within organizations, not outside–are beginning to grab the attention businesses formerly passive about the risks of status quo unpreparedness. Could be just in the nick of time. “We’d be lying if we said breaches were only happening to a small percentage of IBM i systems,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies at HelpSystems and the author of 2016 State of IBM i Security Study.

This is the 13th year for the annual security report that identifies mistakes in system configurations that open the door to a smorgasbord

A new release of the HyperSwap feature in IBM‘s PowerHA Enterprise Edition will give IBM i shops better protection against IBM i downtime–in particular during planned downtime events, like operating system upgrades. IBM also released a statement of direction to bring more disaster recovery (DR) capabilities to HyperSwap, including support for a remotely located third copy of IBM i data.

HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature introduced two years ago with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The mainframe-class technology relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous data replication protocol (i.e. Metro Mirror) to replicate DB2 for

In 1964, as IBM announced the System/360, Marshall McLuhan, a professor at the University of Toronto, published a remarkable book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He said each medium, independent of its content, is a powerful social force with characteristics that reshape the way people are interconnected.

McLuhan distilled his thesis to a single memorable phrase: the medium is the message. Like print, radio, movies, and television, computing technologies, from the punch card to the mainframe to the mobile internet, are media, too. IBM doesn’t fully understand this; consequently, it flails and struggles.

Marshall McLuhan:

One of IT Jungle‘s touchstone people in the IBM midrange community is Jim Buck. He’s just signed on for his 13th year as president of the Wisconsin Midrange Computing Professionals Association (WMCPA) and his day job is RPG instructor at Gateway Technical College. He is also the co-author of Programming in RPG IV, which is in its fifth edition. Buck knows the IBM i territory, and his experiences are indicators of where we are.

Buck’s WMCPA connections combined with his teaching role at Gateway Technical College have developed into a pipeline of young talent that flows into