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Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems
March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen
The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)
For me, all of this pales in comparison …
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Guru: Create A UDTF Wrapper For A Stored Procedure Result Set
February 4, 2019 Michael Sansoterra
In the tip, Arranging Query Logic in DB2 for i Routines, I addressed a reader’s question about how to create a user-defined table function (UDTF) in DB2 for i that would return the same result set as an existing stored procedure. The purpose of having the UDTF would be to do additional processing on a result set, such as joining the result set with another query or dumping the result set to a temporary table for analysis. To accomplish this, I suggested moving the stored procedure query logic into a UDTF and then replace the query within the stored …
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IBM Winds Down PowerVM V2, Nudges Customers To PowerVM V3
November 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may not occur to you, but the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor that Big Blue created for Power Systems servers has a version just like every other piece of software in the world, and like all software, it ages and eventually it is retired from the field in lieu of more modern code.
In announcement letter 918-129, IBM let it be known that PowerVM V2, of which there were three releases, will be withdrawn from marketing on February 19, 2019 and will have its support withdrawn on September 30, 2020. That may seem like a long time away from …
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Four Hundred Monitor, October 10
October 10, 2018 Jenny Thomas
With Fall COMMON conference right around the corner in Steel City beginning on October 15, now seems like a good time to remind ourselves why it is important to stay on top of new technology and use your voice to participate in our IBM i ecosystem. Without the opportunity to learn from experts and trade ideas, any industry runs the risk of fading away. While COMMON offers all sorts of hands-on sessions and group discussion panels to feed your IBM i needs, travel isn’t always plausible due to things like work, money, and family obligations. Even if you can’t get …
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Serious Security Vulns Patched In IBM i
September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie
No good deed goes unpunished. Such as it is with cybersecurity, which demands unceasing attention paid to a never-ending stream of flaws and patches as the cost of remaining off the front page. To that end, IBM patched several more security flaws in IBM i last week, including two serious flaws in Node.js, five critical vulnerabilities in Samba, and one moderate flaw in OpenSSH.
It’s easy to get lulled into a false state of security on the IBM i server, thanks to its unique architecture, cryptic file names, and reputation for strong security. It’s hard enough to find programmers, administrators, …
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Adventures In IBM i Encryption
September 17, 2018 Tom Woolaway
Are you impacted by the New York Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies? If you are a banking, insurance, or brokerage firm that uses a license to operate in New York, these regulations require specific cybersecurity practices be implemented. Section 500.15 Encryption of Nonpublic Information requires encryption at rest of non-public information. Or perhaps you have other reasons to want to encrypt your IBM i drives.
This article focuses on encryption at rest of the disk drives of IBM i systems using 57XX-SS1 Option 45 – Encrypted ASP Enablement, where you end up with an unencrypted system ASP 1 and …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 13
June 13, 2018 Dan Burger
Our summer publishing schedule has prevented us from catching you up on what’s been going on around the IBM i ecosystem of late, but we always have our eye on the community for you. As you will note in our Top Stories below, Big Blue has been especially busy in many different tech arenas and around the globe.
Top Stories From Outside The Jungle
(The Motley Fool) CEO Ginni Rometty declares IBM’s new AI Supercomputer one of Big Blue’s greatest achievements as Summit makes its debut.
(ZDNet) The clouds are rolling in as IBM creates 18 new “availability zones” in …
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Syncsort Talks Rebranding, IBM i Product Strategy
May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie
Think you know Syncsort? Who the company is and what it does? Well, you might want to take a fresh peek, because the company that acquired Vision Solutions and a handful of other IBM i software firms is on the move. In fact, it used the COMMON POWERUp 18 conference in San Antonio this week to begin rolling out a long-awaited company rebranding and major product refresh – including its new Fusion unification strategy and several new IBM i products.
First of all, the company will continue to be known as Syncsort. The executives leading the Pearl River, New …
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Four Hundred Monitor, May 23
May 23, 2018 Dan Burger
COMMON stole the spotlight this week with its POWERUp 18 event in Austin, Texas. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie was our boots on the ground at the show, giving us the inside scoop from the opening session and what appears to be a bright future for IBM i and the Power business. And we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the continued celebrations of the 30th anniversary of our beloved platform. If you haven’t been reading The Four Hundred this week, you have been missing out. After you catch up here, take a look below at what’s happening …
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Big Blue Gives IBM i Shops A Special 30th Birthday Bash Box
May 21, 2018 Dan Burger
Big Blue is in the middle of celebrating three decades of the IBM i platform, and the company has unveiled a special birthday box that commemorates the occasion. It’s essentially a Solutions Edition package with some extra bells and whistles. For those unfamiliar with the Solutions Editions, they are pre-configured systems with a choice of IBM and ISV software discounts applied. Those discounts would be unavailable when buying the systems or the software individually.
The IBM i 30th Edition offering is based on IBM i Solution Edition Power9 Model S914, a P05 tier box, with four cores. All of the …
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