• Four Hundred Monitor, May 25

  May 25, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  It’s an exciting week in the Jungle as COMMON’s POWERUp 2022 wraps up and the reporting begins. Our own Alex Woodie was on the show floor, and he will be bringing us all of the latest releases, news, and announcements in the coming weeks. So we have to kick off this week’s Monitor by re-directing you back to the Top Story directly from the Big Easy, but this is only the beginning of the coverage you can expect from Alex, who was busy attending sessions, meeting with vendors, and finding out what’s in store for the IBM i.

  Top Stories

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 21

  May 25, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Not to give you any work to do, but I am going to give you some work to do. There is a new service pack for system firmware level MH1010, and this service pack, which you can read about here, addresses a HIPER issue. Next, compression with the ZLIB algorithm with Geographic Mirroring synchronization is coming soon! You can find out more about it at this link. And finally, check out the infrastructure changes that are coming to IBM Electronic Fix Distribution / IBM Fix Central system, which might necessitate customer firewall and proxy setting changes, which you …

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• How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

  What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …

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• Immutable Copies Are Only As Good As Your Validation

  May 23, 2022 Stan Wilkins

  A system can always be replaced, but the files and objects that comprise the application and the data that makes it useful can fall victim to all sorts of decay, neglect, or abuse in a modern system. And that is why we did backups to tape subsystems, or even tape libraries and then virtual tape libraries based on disk drives for so many years. And for those who cannot afford to have downtime or lost data, the IBM i base has been fortunate to have some of the best high availability clustering ever invented.

  With ransomware and malware attacks on …

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• Guru: IBM i *USRPRF Security

  May 23, 2022 Bruce Bading

  IBM i has long enjoyed a reputation of being one of the most securable application servers in the industry. IBM i object encapsulation or object-oriented architecture achieves a level of technology integrity not found in file-based systems such as Unix, Linux, and Windows – as long as QSECUTY is set to 40 or 50.

  This advanced technology however does not exclude the IBM i from security risks if your development teams are not practicing (DevSecOps | CSRC (nist.gov)) and (Zero Trust Architecture | NIST).

  Let me remind what one of the lead signatories on the Agile …

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• ERP Transitions Loom for SAP on IBM i Customers

  May 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Unless SAP changes its plans, the company will end mainstream support for its business software running on IBM i in five years, with an option for extended maintenance through 2030. The looming end of support for the decades-long partnership between the IBM i organization and the German software giant puts about 1,500 joint customers in the tough spot of deciding how to transition away from their current ERP platform. And one they have probably invested a lot of time, money, and effort into.

  SAP’s preferred destination for all of its ECC (ERP Central Component) and Business Suite customers – …

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• Inflation Pumps Up Global IT Spending, Supply Chain Deflates It

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is not a newsflash, but it is a bit crazy out there on Earth right now. Predicting what spending will be in any industry and for any durable good or service is extremely difficult. But, prediction is what humans do, and the prognosticators at Gartner have done their best to try to figure out where IT spending is going to go in the next two years.

  As far as they can tell, global IT spending actually rose by a remarkable 9.5 percent to $4.26 trillion in 2021, with spending being particularly brisk for software and devices (which includes PCs, …

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• COMMON Set for First Annual Conference in Three Years

  May 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but COMMON is about to hold its first annual conference in three years. Starting on Monday in New Orleans, POWERUp 2022 will be the biggest gathering of the IBM i community since the pandemic started more than two years ago. There is still time to register for the conference, which will feature a raft of presentations on the newly released IBM i version 7.5.

  COMMON’s annual conference scheduled for the New Orleans Marriott next week is shaping up to be a good one. More than 100 speakers are scheduled to present more than 300 sessions on …

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• API Operations Management for Safe, Powerful, and High Performance APIs

  May 18, 2022 Daniel Magid

  Now that API enablement for IBM i applications has become mainstream, IBM i users are starting to ask questions around how best to manage API operations. To get the most out of your APIs and to provide your API users with the very best experience, you must:

  • Ensure your APIs are up, running and providing rapid responses.
  • Protect your APIs from attacks, misuse and faulty calls coming from API end users.
  • Have a strategy for creating, deploying and maintaining your APIs over time.

  In other words, you need to make sure that your APIs deliver the same reliability, security, performance …

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• What’s New in IBM i Services and Networking

  May 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM delivered a slew of new IBM i services with the delivery of IBM i 7.5 last week, giving IBM i professionals handle new methods for working with various components of the platform. The new releases of the operating system also brings a number of enhancements in the networking stack, which are notable for several reasons.

  The past several new releases and Technology Refreshes (TRs) have brought new IBM i services, which are SQL-based alternatives to traditional ways of accessing things on the platform like IBM i objects, system information, and other components. At this point, IBM has …

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