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Four Hundred Monitor, November 6
November 6, 2019 Jenny Thomas
November is the month that reminds us to stop and think about the positive things in our lives and remember to be thankful for all those good things. In our personal lives, family and health are probably at the top of your list. At IT Jungle, our readers and advertisers are at the top of ours. We continue to be thankful for this platform and its ecosystem that gives us life, and to the people who read our articles every week who give us purpose. Now that we have shared our gratitude, we’d like to share the news of the …
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Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server
November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.
This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …
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Revenge Of The Zombie Green Screen
October 30, 2019 Alex Woodie
Don’t look now, but command line interfaces – which were supposed to have been killed off years ago at the hands of superior graphical user interfaces (GUIs) – are making a comeback in the general IT scene. And the command line love appears to be spilling over into the IBM i.
Command line interfaces, or CLIs, never completely disappeared from the scene. Even Windows 10 users can summon the dark magic of the DOS prompt with a few tactical clicks of the keyboard, mouse, or (God forbid) touchscreen. But like crazy uncles and credit card debt, the CLI has largely …
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Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2
October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie
Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.
“Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …
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Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems
October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.
In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.
The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …
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IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror
September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie
Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.
The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …
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IBM Patches New Security Flaws in Java, OpenSSL
April 3, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM this week patched a series of flaws in IBM i’s Java environment, including a pair of very serious problems in the OpenJ9 runtime that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, in addition to a series of less-severe Java vulnerabilities. The company also fixed a new flaw found in IBM i’s OpenSSL implementation.
A total of seven Java flaws that impact IBM i versions 7.1 through 7.3 were addressed with one security bulletin issued by IBM on March 29. IBM issued Group PTFs for each release of the operating system to address them. A single OpenSSL flaw also …
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Guru: IBM i Save File Compression Options
April 1, 2019 Michael Sansoterra
As I finished populating some test tables with a large volume of data on a small and transient IBM i partition in the cloud, I thought life was good. But my countenance fell as I realized the tables plus OS hogged over 70 percent of the disk space. I wondered how to get all the data into a single save file for safe keeping.
The buzzer in my mind was loud and clear: it ain’t gonna work, you don’t have enough room. As I loathed the thought of using multiple save files to save my test data, I remembered that …
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Rebuilding The Bottom Of The Pyramid
March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how Big Blue had extended the life of the Power8-based entry Power S812 Mini, announced on Valentine’s Day last year specifically to give entry IBM i shops a cheaper alternative than buying the Power S814 or Power S824. It seems to me that IBM needs to do some rejiggering of the way it bundles and prices this entry machine to get the installed base of customers using vintage hardware and operating systems to get current and stay there.
We are under the impression that the number …
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Assessing IBM i’s Role In Digital Transformation
March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie
There comes a time in every application’s life when its owner must take a hard look at its continued viability and ask the tough question: Will the application continue to meet the business’s evolving needs, or should the whole thing be scrapped for something new? These business and technology assessments can be especially tough when the software runs on the IBM i server.
Many companies these days are looking to modernize their aging IT systems in the hopes of gaining more agility and flexibility. Whether you call it digital transformation or application modernization, the goals are often similar: Simplify the …
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