• IBM Expands Flash Drives For Power8 Iron

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, IBM announced a new lineup of small form factor disk drives with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors as well as updates for 2.5-inch flash drives that were a little bit on the beefy size. We suspect that these drives were intended to be co-launched with Power9-based servers, as well as some new, skinnier flash drives that were announced just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

  On November 21, in announcement letter 117-108, Big Blue rolled out the new 2.5-inch flash drives that are based on 3D NAND flash memory and are rated at …

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• VAI Experiments With Watson

  November 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard not to hear about Watson these days, especially since IBM changed the name of its Power Systems division to Cognitive Systems. But what can the cognitive service bring to pragmatic IBM i shops who are wary of change? The ERP software company VAI is at the forefront of experimentation.

  According to VAI CIO Kevin Beasley, VAI started working with Watson in 2016. A lot of the early work that year involved manually uploading a bunch of ERP data into Watson, mixing it with data supplied by IBM, and then seeing what Watson came up with.

  One of …

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• Bring Docker To IBM i

  November 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  One of the fundamental shifts in the way people think about building applications is the use of containers, packages that include: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings. Containerized software runs equally well regardless of the environment. Docker is the most popular of the container platform providers. And there is a group of IBM i advocates who would like to see Docker support added to IBM i.

  One of those supporters is Kim Greene, a Domino on IBM i consultant, with clients who would benefit from Docker support. Specifically, Greene sees an opportunity for supporting Verse on Premises (VOP) …

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• Understanding Your 2FA Options for IBM i

  November 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to have too much security on the Web these days, particularly with a preponderance of hackers, botnets, and keyloggers hanging around. One way to boost one’s cyber security is to use two-factor authentication, or 2FA, when connecting to sensitive applications and databases. Luckily, the technology is available for IBM i, too.

  2FA is a technique that boosts the security of the log-on process and thwarts unauthorized access of sensitive systems. Instead of letting a person onto a computer based on the combination of just a user name and password, 2FA requires the person to have an extra identifier. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 15

  November 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  IT strategic planning is an oxymoron at many organizations. Controlled chaos is often the oxymoron that better describes the situation. A fast-changing business environment combined with a constant flow of technology hype can make strategy sessions difficult. A “we don’t do things that way” status protection system can also be a strategy barrier. But some find the process of developing a strategy as valuable as the strategy itself.

  This week in Monitor we also have articles on the risks and advantages of BYOD mobile policies, integrating security in DevOps, and keeping a watchful eye on the facts and fiction regarding …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 44

  November 15, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The action this week in the IBM i PTF Guide is all in HIPERs for all three releases and in the Security groups for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. Also, there is a recommended fix for IBM i 7.2, one of the baddies. The QMGtools were also updated for all releases.

  Also, we have an important reminder: Java 6 will be going out of support on December 31, 2017. So be sure to update your Java applications to Java 8 or Java 7 to ensure a safe and secure application environment.

  The PTF updates this week are as follows:

  IBM …

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• More On That Power8 Core Activation Deal

  November 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In days gone by, which unfortunately I remember very well, it was not that difficult for any of us to find out what the pricing on every single piece of hardware and software was that comprised an IBM system. The difficulty with IBM’s very sophisticated pricing databases was reckoning how the many pieces fit together to build a system.

  Pricing information for Power Systems iron is a bit harder to come by these days, and as far as I know the pricing databases that I had access to for more than two decades were re-routed to configurators that could only …

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• Coming Attractions: The IBM i App Dev Multi-Platform Show

  November 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  Multi-platform development is more vision than reality. Application development is still a siloed environment as programming work remains more isolated and less collaborative than visionary thinkers wish it to be. Therefore, the existence of multiple programming environments within an organization seldom reaches the goal of operating as a team. Much of the potential benefit of teamwork lingers out of reach. Instead of a single team with common operations, there are individual teams with individual operations.

  The good news is that it’s better than it used to be. Still, the fabric of multi-platform unity and the efficiencies it would bring to …

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• Guru: Faster Fetching, Revisited

  November 13, 2017 Paul Tuohy

  While visiting a client recently, I was shown how they were using a multi-row FETCH into a multiple-occurrence data structure to retrieve large sets of data. When I asked why they were not using a data structure array instead, I was referred to an IT Jungle article in which Ted Holt answered a question on whether it was faster to perform a row-at-a-time FETCH or a multi-row FETCH when using embedded SQL.

  Ted provided a comparison between a row-at-a-time FETCH, a multi-row FETCH into a data structure array, and a multi-row FETCH into a multiple-occurrence data structure. At the end …

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• As I See It: The Pros and Cons of Doing Nothing

  November 13, 2017 Victor Rozek

  In an era when information circles the globe in seconds, and distant events are posted and assessed within minutes, it is unimaginable that all of humanity owes an incalculable debt to a man who essentially remains unknown – for an action that didn’t occur.

  The year was 1983, a dangerous and bellicose time. Russia had just shot down a Korean Airliner with 269 people aboard, and the Cold War was still under full simmer. Khrushchev had once promised to bury the United States and now Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and vowed to “write the final pages” …

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