• IBM i Shines In Academic Research Data Center

  February 15, 2016 Dan Burger

  The Power Systems Academic Initiative is more than classes that teach RPG, PHP, and enterprise computing. It’s much more. It’s about research and the role of information technology. And more and more it’s about data and analyses. Where this is headed has caused the Academic Initiative data center to relocate to accommodate growth and the requests from colleges and universities that keeps IBM i in the midst of innovation. During the past month and a half, the AI data center has found a new home in Tucson, Arizona, in a facility IBM uses primarily for its storage product testing and

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• Where’s MKS Implementer? Alive and Well At PTC

  February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie

  It’s been years since we could talk about the Big Three of IBM i change management system vendors. Aldon, SoftLanding, and Mortice Kearns Systems have all been gobbled up by bigger software houses whose core business models, alas, do not revolve around the IBM i. And while IT Jungle has kept up with the first two, we haven’t delivered any insight on the MKS Implementer product that Parametric Technology Corp acquired several years ago–until now. PTC bought MKS in 2011 for $295.5 million (Canadian). As a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software, Massachusetts-based PTC is a much larger company,

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• The Jobs Of The People Who Make IBM i Platforms Work

  February 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time talking about hardware and software here at IT Jungle, but there is another crucial element to the platform that often gets overlooked: the people who turn the machines into applications and, in turn, money from which they derive their many livings. The systems have evolved on the confluence of Moore’s Law advancement curves for their constituent components, but if people want to advance, they have to work hard to keep pace with new technology while maintaining the old. The whole point of the System/38, and its follow on, the AS/400 and its successors,

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• From Green Screens To Web Services: An ROI Story

  February 8, 2016 Dan Burger

  There are times when we find ourselves in the wrong place, but it turns out to be the right time. Les Peebles can tell you about that. During a presentation on webfacing 5250 screens, a technology that Peebles was not in favor of implementing, he was introduced to a web services option that came to be a solution to the IBM i and Windows integration issues he was grappling with. The wrong place was now the right place. Peebles began his IT career as an RPG developer. In the years that followed, he learned Java and web development. He also

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• App Dev Evolution Opens Doors For Midrange Dynamics

  February 8, 2016 Dan Burger

  Application development continues to be the name of the game in IBM midrange shops. What’s changing is the integration of development environments. RPG development remains the meat and potatoes, but a growing list of side dish environments are on the table. Change management software helps maintain order as these diverse entities cross paths, but it also takes on more responsibilities beyond the strictly app dev assignments. Take Midrange Dynamics, for example. Its latest release of MDCMS, Version 7.4, features cross-system tracking capabilities at the top of the priority list. Workflow, troubleshooting, and deployment improvements have been added, but the

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• IBM Patches OpenSSH Security Flaws That Impact IBM i

  February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched another pair of security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSH client for IBM i. The security flaws, which impact all current releases of IBM i–and very likely older releases that are no longer under maintenance–carry a moderate to severe risk, and could be used to execute arbitrary code on an IBM i server, obtain private cryptographic security keys, or execute a denial of service attack, IBM says. On February 1, IBM issued a security bulletin to address the two flaws in its OpenSSH implementation for IBM i. Both flaws stem from a poor design in the OpenSSH client

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• Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Your Own

  February 1, 2016 Dan Burger

  The distance between the IT department and the executive suite in some IBM midrange shops makes a trip to Mars seem like a hop, skip, and a jump. How do you close that gap? How do you explain to the decision makers the difference that IT can make within the organization? You know what could be accomplished with investments in IT, but executive sign off on IT strategy never materializes. You’re spinning your wheels. You want to get traction? Build a financial foundation for the project. That’s easy to say, but harder to do. You’re going to need help. Going

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• Scared of Tests? MIMIX Has You Covered with ‘Virtual Switch’ Feature

  February 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Nearly one in five high availability users never test their HA setup, while more than 40 percent aren’t sure whether it will work, according to the 2016 State of Resilience report from Vision Solutions. The “set it and forget” mentality has plagued the HA industry for years, but it’s something Vision is now addressing with the new “virtual switch” capability in the latest release of MIMIX Availability. Vision surveyed more than 2,600 IT professionals in late 2015 regarding the state of their data resilience strategies, and compiled the results into a 60-page report that it released last week (get

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• Big IBM i Shops Get Beefier Memory

  February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there is no question that the installed base of OS/400, i5/OS and IBM i machinery in the world–probably something on the order of 150,000 machines–is dominated by small machines with one or two processors and only a couple of cores at most activated, there are still some very, very large customers out there. These companies are driving the performance requirements for Power Systems iron, just like big AIX and Linux shops are doing. While all of the world gets in a tizzy over in-memory processing, the single-level storage architecture of the System/38’s CPF and the AS/400’s OS/400 make this

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• Yet Another IBM Pricing Scheme For Power MSPs

  February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the problems with hardware is that it is a sunk capital cost to acquire it, which is why financing and now cloud computing, where you lease or rent the capacity in a server or storage array rather than buy it, is popular. But the service providers building Power-based clouds are not always happy to do financing. They want IBM to offer flexible pricing without them having to take the risk. And so, several times over the past couple of years, Big Blue has offered special pricing for systems software and hardware to managed service providers. In announcement letter

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