• Myth Buster: Changing Your HA/DR Software Is Not Hard Work!

  November 9, 2022 Ash Giddings

  With inflation putting an added squeeze on IT spend, now is the right time to look at potential HA/DR alternatives. But, given its importance, you need to ensure that you are improving your resilience, and not trading off functionality, performance, and support to make savings.

  Logical replication, for high availability and disaster recovery, has been the “go-to” technology for many years, and is still very much the leading approach within the IBM i community.

  Nervousness about what costs, implementation effort and trade-offs may be required to change HA/DR solutions, means that many organizations simply rollover the status quo. In doing …

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• How HelpSystems Became Fortra

  November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems, a longtime provider of utilities for IBM i servers and their predecessors, has been on the security warpath of late, using private equity funding to acquire dozens of security software and services firms. The Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company officially completed its pivot to security last week by changing its name to Fortra.

  HelpSystems started life back in 1982 when it was founded by Dick Jacobson, who created the first Robot/38 product. Over the years, the company (then called “Help/Systems”) would expand its well-respected suite of general-purpose Robot utilities, such as job scheduling, backup and recovery, and system monitoring, for …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 9

  November 9, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  It’s been another busy week in the Jungle. Even as the year is winding down, there is lots happening around our industry, and we’ve got it filtered down to something more quickly digestible in Monitor. We found a few interesting and fun news tidbits for you, as well as some new resources. We may need to start a podcast section as we’re watching that niche work its way into the IBM i ecosystem. The calendar is starting to look a little thin as we head into the holidays, but we do have a few events left that might be of …

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• The Rich Parfait That Is Cloud Spending

  November 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Most IBM i shops are so used to having an integrated system that runs their mission critical systems of record and some of their systems of engagement and Web infrastructure workloads, too, that they may forget that the rest of the world does not always experience their IT in this relatively monolithic way.

  The top 50,000 or so organizations in the world tend to take a best-of-breed approach to every application and its underlying layers of infrastructure, so they have a hodge-podge of stuff. The next million or so organizations have to be more conservative and keep the infrastructure diversity …

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• Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud

  November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.

  We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Digital Solutions For IBM i And Beyond

  November 7, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin and Scott Gingerysty

  IT leaders need to develop strategies that address business goals but also look ahead to a changing economic climate and disruptions. Digital innovation (web, mobile, APis, cloud, etc.)  is one of the fastest growing areas of IT. And it’s no wonder – taking on these initiatives while using an iterative approach can deliver quick wins and attainable near-term impacts. This allows organizations to invest in ways that are sustainable.

  As organizations look to new business models, seeing technology as a way to accomplish business objectives is the right approach. Competition, market disruption, growth, cost optimization and responding to client needs …

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• Momentum Builds For Code For IBM i

  November 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Energy and excitement are building in the IBM i development community thanks to Code for IBM i, the VS Code extension that enables users to write and edit RPG and COBOL code in a Web browser. Spearheaded by Liam Allan, who now works for IBM, the lightweight alternative to RDi is approaching critical mass among IBM i developers desperate for something new.

  For many years, IBM i shops had few options available to them when it comes to developing ILE applications for IBM i. IBM’s default recommendation was Rational Developer for i, the Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) that …

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• As I See It: Second Responder

  November 7, 2022 Victor Rozek

  If a thousand people were asked to complete the sentence: “The world could sure use more …” they would doubtless come up with a variety of thoughtful and compelling answers. But I’m willing to bet not one in a thousand would say “cockroaches.”

  Nonetheless, advances in technology and miniaturization all but guarantee robotic roaches will be part of our supporting cast in what is rapidly becoming a sci-fi-esque future. Apparently, researchers have long had a keen interest in what insects do and how they do it, although one would think what roaches do shouldn’t be much of a mystery. They …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 45

  November 7, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Hello good people of IBM i Land. There’s a security vulnerability you need to take a look at to see if it affects your system, and a whole bunch of PTF patches for all kinds of things. Let’s start with the vulnerability, which you can see in Security Bulletin: Zlib for IBM i is vulnerable to a buffer overflow issue during inflate (CVE-2022-37434) and which you can find out more about here.

  This is not the same vulnerability in Zlib for IBM i that we told you about last week, so don’t think we are a skipping record here. …

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• Db2 Web Query Gets ML-Powered Insights, Cloud DW Connection

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Organizations adopting the latest release of Db2 Web Query will find new capabilities in the graphical designer, an automated insights generation function that uses machine learning as well as new capabilities in the data migration tool that will help customers move data to cloud data warehouses, among other capabilities.

  Db2 Web Query is IBM’s flagship business intelligence offering for the IBM i platform. The software is based on WebFOCUS, the BI offering developed by Information Builders, with whom IBM has had an OEM relationship since 2007. In 2021, Information Builders was acquired by TIBCO Software, which has continued …

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