• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 33

  September 9, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  We are back to the Quiet Time again in PTF Land, and we are beginning to wonder if the slowdown in patches has anything to do with the recent closures of the research and development labs by China, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. Probably not. But maybe.

  Fact is, there is not a lot going on this week, and thankfully no security vulnerabilities that we could see.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • RPG Café

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High

  …

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• Could a CrowdStrike-Type Outage Hit IBM i?

  August 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It’s been a month since CrowdStrike caused a massive IT outage that took down large swaths of the Internet, causing billions of dollars in damage. The CrowdStrike outage was a Windows-only affair, but it’s worth asking: Could a similar incident impact IBM i?

  The largest IT outage in history began the morning of July 19, when a poorly configured update to CrowdStrike’s endpoint security software, called Falcon, caused 8.5 million Windows computers to crash, resulting in the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD).

  For computer users of a certain vintage, the BSOD is – or at least was – …

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• How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.

  But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …

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• Is It Worth Investing in IBM i and RPG?

  August 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is mistaking the IBM i server as a brand-new system. It can’t hide from its status as a legacy platform. But does that mean that it’s no longer worth investing in IBM i and RPG? That’s the focus of a new paper by the outsourcing company DDC FPO.

  DDC FPO is an Evergreen, Colorado-based business process outsourcing company that serves the trucking industry and specializes in things like freight billing and customer service for truckers. Considering the continued popularity of the IBM i server in the trucking business, it’s not surprising that DDC has taken an interest in the …

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• Getting A Handle On What GenAI Might Cost

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of my other day job at The Next Platform, I can give you a pretty good idea about what it costs to train an AI model or run inference against it once it is trained. But I have seen very little data that tries to give any of a sense of what it costs to add generative AI functionality to applications.

  But interestingly, Gartner analysts embedded some such data in a report about how it expected many GenAI projects to be abandoned by the end of 2025 after their proofs of concept fail. That so many PoCs will …

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• IBM Kills Off Fax/400, But Alternatives Are Available

  August 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM will cease supporting Facsimile Support for i, commonly known as Fax/400, with the next release of the IBM i operating system, it announced last month. That tees up an opportunity for third-party vendors like Fresche Solutions and others to fill the void for a communication technology that is still used by businesses.

  The IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX) product was not among the group of 16 IBM i products that IBM initially withdrew from sales and support with its discontinuance of support letter back on May 7, the same day that it announced the latest technology refreshes (TRs) …

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• AI In The Cloud: The PowerVS Advantage

  August 19, 2024 Tom Horan

  The relentless advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) necessitates a robust infrastructure that can manage complex data, deliver powerful processing, and scale efficiently. While traditional on-prem solutions have their merits, the cloud model is modern. By fusing the control and performance of best-in-breed high-performing systems in the cloud with the flexibility and scalability of the model, organizations can elevate their AI workloads to new heights of efficiency and innovation.

  The foundation of this strategy is PowerVS, IBM’s robust cloud platform for running enterprise applications. Watsonx.ai is IBM’s generative AI and scientific data platform that enables the use of AI models. PowerVS …

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• IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.

  This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …

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• IBM Tweaks Power10 Hardware: Fatter Memory, Other Stuff

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We haven’t seen a lot of hardware announcements this year from Big Blue for the Power Systems platform, and you really should not expect much in the way of new hardware when Power11 systems are expected to be launched in 2025 and the Power10 machines have been in the field since late 2021 for the Power E1080 and since July 2022 for the rest of the line.

  To be fair, we did have the entry “Bonnell” Power S1012 machine come out in May this year. So it has not been a total drought. But hardware launches are not on an …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 32

  August 19, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  You knew that this was not going to last forever. We had a few weeks where there were not any security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, and now you have three you need to attend to this week. There are some patches for WebSphere middleware as well.

  Let’s start with the security issues.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to July 2024 CPU, which you can read all about here. The affected products include:

  Affected Product(s)					Version(s)
  IBM WebSphere Application Server			

  …

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