• IBM i Survey Gets Better As Numbers Grow

  October 11, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i Strategy and Roadmap document lays out the plan for the future. That’s great. We need to see where we’re going. But the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey indicates whether IBM i shops are following the roadmap or charting their own courses. Now in its third year, the survey is our best view of the ecosystem. October is survey month and we encourage IT Jungle readers to get involved in this IBM i assessment. The 2016 Marketplace Survey was based on the responses of 834 IBM i shops. That was more than three times the number that weighed

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• IBM Prepping For October Power Systems Push

  October 3, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is officially the autumn now, and that usually means Power Systems hardware and software announcements from IBM. IBM is not going to refresh its commercial Power Systems line with Power8+ processors this year, as it might have done with the strategy from years past, but as we pointed out a few weeks ago, there is a Power8 chip with integrated NVLink ports aimed at hybrid supercomputers. An aside: Europeans say “autumn” because it sounds less severe that “fall,” a reference to deciduous forests losing their leaves I presume, but autumn only came into English usage from Latin by

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• Private Big Iron Power8 Clouds To Puff Up With IBM i

  October 3, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last month, at the Edge conference in Las Vegas, IBM rolled out a new subset of the Power Systems line aimed at midrange and large enterprises that want to build private clouds. In the past, IBM’s cloud efforts have been centered around its low-end Power machinery, with one or two sockets, with the assumption that companies want to build Power clouds that look like distributed, virtual, and orchestrated systems based on Intel Xeon E5 processors. This is not necessarily a valid assumption. A cloud is about orchestration and automation, not about a particular form factor and NUMA scalability of a

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• Could IBM i And System z Share Easy Source?

  October 3, 2016 Dan Burger

  How far can really old, monolithic RPG code be extended? Some might say the end is in sight. Others might say if it ain’t broke, why fix it. It’s an application modernization dilemma. How much time is being devoted to application maintenance? Is the code worth saving as is, can it be modified as the basis of a modernization effort, or is it time for a total rewrite? These questions are on the minds of IBM midrange shops. There are a variety of software vendors in the application modernization business with technology and products designed to help companies make decisions

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• Big Blue Patches 14 More OpenSSL Flaws In IBM i

  October 3, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the OpenSSL encryption protocol will want to know that IBM last week issued program temporary fixes (PTFs) for 14 security vulnerabilities impacting IBM i versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. If you’re running an older version of the IBM i OS, you are out of luck. Like most modern operating systems, IBM i includes a range of open source components. That includes OpenSSL, which is an open source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) wire encryption protocols that’s managed by the OpenSSL Project. As we learned following the big

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• Two Fall Conferences Are Must-See IT

  October 3, 2016 Dan Burger

  In just a few weeks, the COMMON user group has two conferences offering IBM i education. It’s good to know there are still companies and individuals that value the development of IT expertise, innovation, and industry best practices. The evolution of IBM i skills has never been more important than it is today, but overall the attendance at technical conferences has remained at about the same level for the past five years. COMMON has its Fall Conference scheduled for October 24-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and BeNeLux Power 2016–hosted by COMMON organizations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is set for

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• PowerHA Implementations No Picnic; Help On The Way

  September 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Easy as pie does not describe the implementation process for PowerHA. It can be a mind-bender, even in shops where the staffing is adequate and the skills are current. So how about something a little easier to implement and why not make it applicable to all three operating systems that run on Power? It’s coming soon, even though the official announcement has yet to be made. Easier implementation should be a big boost to PowerHA. At least that’s what Satya Sharma, CTO and IBM Power Systems Fellow, told me when we met last week at the Edge 2016 conference in

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• Why RFID Is (Finally) Here To Stay

  September 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now folks, but some of the big claims that people made about radio frequency identification (RFID) a decade ago finally are starting to come true. For companies in the manufacturing and retail industries, there’s simply no denying the major efficiency gains that RFID projects are now delivering. Here are some of the reasons why RFID is finally here, and what took so long. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. When Wal-Mart issued a mandate for all of its suppliers to adopt case-level RFID tagging back 2003, the transition was expected to take about two years.

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• Tokenization Without Technical Expertise? Townsend Says It’s Here

  September 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Tokenization has emerged as a favorite technique for protecting sensitive data without the heavy performance, storage, and productivity hit that encryption entails. However, implementing a tokenization solution has typically required advanced development expertise, at least on the IBM i platform. Now Townsend Security has introduced a new IBM i-based tokenization solution that it says delivers the benefits of tokenization without involving programmers. Tokenization is an advanced form of encryption that’s gaining traction among banks, retailers, and payment gateways. The technique works by replacing the value of sensitive database fields, such as a credit card numbers, with randomly generated index keys,

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• PHP and IBM i: Ten Years of Magic

  September 28, 2016 Amy Anderson

  The online world recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Young adults entering the workforce today have never known life without it. But for those who were working on green screen terminals in the mid-1990s and saw for the first time what a modem-connected PC could deliver, the World Wide Web was indistinguishable from magic. And the ability to deliver magic exploded with the emergence of a development language originally called PHP/FI. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, PHP stood for personal home pages and form interpreter. It gave a new class of developers, called webmasters,

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