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Standing Pat Is No Longer an Option With the HMC
March 19, 2021
New POWER9 servers running new firmware won’t work with your old HMC. Rob McNelly explains why, and provides some upgrade options.
ArticlesExtend the IBM i Administration Runtime Expert With Custom Plug-ins
March 18, 2021
Creating custom plug-ins for Administration Runtime Expert extends functionality
ArticlesCOBOL Supports the World’s Business Operations
March 17, 2021
“Fine wine gets better with age,” or so the phrase goes. Oddly, this aphorism also in a way applies to COBOL. It was great when it was developed, but over the 60-plus years it’s been around, it’s actually improved in some ways, even enabling many companies to enter the digital age. Reports suggesting hundreds of […]
ArticlesThe Cybersecurity Market Is Rapidly Growing
March 12, 2021
With the rise of internet usage and availability has also come an increase in cybercrimes like scamming, phishing and hacking. This has created a high demand for cybersecurity protocols and policies to help keep enterprises safe from cyber-attacks. According to a 2020 report from Global Market Insights (GMI), the cybersecurity market has been flourishing in […]
ArticlesAIX at 35 and the Layered Significance of AIX 7.3
March 10, 2021
Rob McNelly on AIX and Power hardware improvements, and where the AIX roadmap might lead beyond 2023
ArticlesToday’s Business Systems Run on COBOL
March 10, 2021
In my past life I was a COBOL developer. Yes, I did use Herman Hollerith 80-column punched cards to do my programming. Yes, COBOL has been around for a very long time and yes, COBOL is very alive and well in the year 2021! 60 years old and counting. Admiral Grace Hopper and COBOL Let’s […]
E-BooksTechChannel E-book: Unlocking COBOL Business Value
March 9, 2021
The ubiquity of both the IBM Z platform and COBOL programming language comes from the forethought IBM put into each in 1964 when the first mainframe was launched. COBOL was optimized for business processing with no need to recompile programs. As a result, it continues to run the world’s economy today. But many COBOL shops […]
ArticlesOverview of the IBM i Administration Runtime Expert
March 4, 2021
The IBM i Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) provides the ability to ensure your environment and application attributes remain in a consistent and expected state. Using ARE, you set up templates that define the attributes you want to verify, run the verification against your own partition or groups of partitions and review reports on any differences […]
ArticlesBuilding an LGBTQ-Inclusive Workplace in the Tech Industry
March 4, 2021
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC), America’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights organization, is on a mission to ensure civil and equal rights for all LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ community is an integral part of American society, but bias, discrimination and bigotry can cause unsafe and unproductive work environment for […]
ArticlesOld COBOL Dog, New JSON, XML and Mobile Workload Tricks
March 3, 2021
What is an old dog? What is a new trick? If COBOL were a human, its 61 years might make it seem eligible for early retirement. But something strange has been happening in the world of established business technology, beginning with the non-retirement of highly-experienced technologists. Yes, there are plenty of people who have followed […]
ArticlesTechnology Training in a Virtual Landscape
March 3, 2021
By now, we’ve all become used to all things virtual. Our meetings, happy hours and family gatherings have all been taking place online. With life still moving forward, effective technology trainings are among other important matters that have moved to virtual. While the popularity of live virtual training and learning had been steadily on the […]
ArticlesUpdating to HMC v9
March 2, 2021
IBM brought out HMC v9 M910 in March 2018 for x86, Power and virtual HMCs. Since then, there have been numerous updates to the v9 code, adding features and fixing bugs. As new releases have come out, requirements for the HMC hardware have changed. The latest release (V9R2M950) no longer supports the x86 HMCs (7042-*) […]
ArticlesTom Huntington on the 2020 HelpSystems Survey and the Effects of the Pandemic
March 2, 2021
Paul Tuohy: Hi everybody. Welcome to another iTalk with Tuohy. So actually it seems like the other day that we were talking Tom and it pretty much was so— Tom Huntington: Right. It was. Paul: I’m joined today by Tom Huntington, who is the executive VP of Technical Solutions on HelpSystems, and we […]
ArticlesWalden Leverich on Open-Source Licensing
February 25, 2021
Charlie Guarino: Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of TechTalk. I’m joined here today by my friend Walden Leverich. Walden is the CEO and founder of Tech Software, a company that delivers software as a service solution for compliance, governance and clinical trial management to hospitals, universities, government agencies, and private sector enterprises. Walden, […]
PodcastsAlixander Joel Laffredo-Dietrich on Joining the Tech Industry and Looking to the Future
February 25, 2021
Reg Harbeck: Hi, I’m Reg Harbeck and today I’m here with Alixander Joel Laffredo-Dietrich, or Alix, and he is now the person in charge, among other things, of the mainframe or IBM Z or Zed portion of the IBM Champions program and a whole lot of other really interesting stuff that he’s up to. Well, […]
ArticlesInnovations in the Terminal Emulation Space
February 23, 2021
A look at innovations in the terminal emulation space, and what to keep in mind when selecting a terminal emulator vendor
ArticlesCloud Market Continues to Grow With Amazon Leading the Pack
February 19, 2021
Recent reports from the Synergy Research Group show that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leader in the cloud infrastructure market. AWS is Amazon’s cloud platform, and its market share made up 32% of the $37 billion cloud market in the fourth quarter of 2020. This is about $4 billion higher than the third quarter […]
ArticlesKey Considerations for Comparing NoSQL and SQL
February 19, 2021
Data models conceptually describe the logical structure of data storage inside a database. While there are many data models, we will mainly talk about two kinds in this guide: 1. Document data models The document data model uses a simpler key-value pairs storage form. The key itself typically takes the form of a string that […]
ArticlesOpen Mainframe Project Launches Tessia, and Expands the Open-Source Ecosystem
February 17, 2021
2020 was a year of widespread instability in the world of business. Companies across the globe, from small businesses to massive corporations, experienced intense financial instability as the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected daily life. Despite widespread uncertainty, several companies actually found themselves experiencing the opposite in 2020, reporting significant growth. One such company was the […]
ArticlesClient Story, VIOS Tips, HMC News and Why You Should Move on From AIX 7.1
February 17, 2021
Rob McNelly explains why older AIX versions run slower, and why it’s time to move on from AIX 7.1
Articles2021 AIX Performance Tuning Update
February 12, 2021
Good systems management involves not only managing system reliability, but it also involves continually trying to maximize system throughput and reduce response time for the users. This requires monitoring and tuning system resources. In order to do that, you need to first determine what your key measurement and tuning criteria are. The first step is […]
ArticlesThe History and Evolution of the VM Workshop
February 11, 2021
The VM Workshop, begun in 1977, was a popular conference largely because the VM community was vibrant and the platform was widely used. “We had tens of thousands of users around the world,” says Len Diegel, president of the workshop and member of the board of directors. Diegel was also a manager on a VM […]
ArticlesHow Air-Gap Backup and Tape-Based Technology Protect Against Cybercrime
February 10, 2021
Cybercrime is a prevalent topic in today’s news. It’s changing the way business is conducted to maintain data integrity and protection from theft. Data is the life blood of any organization; cybercriminals seek to exploit data from human as well as security vulnerabilities inherent to the software or hardware structures. Much of corporate data today […]
E-BooksTechChannel E-book: Using Modern IBM i Application Development Tools
February 8, 2021
Today’s RPG is barely recognizable as its earlier version—in format, syntax, capability and flexibility. It evolved along with programmer needs into a fully free-form language that modern programmers can easily pick up. And RDi is the only editor that supports all modern RPG syntax and features. Similarly, one of the IBM i platform’s greatest strengths […]
ArticlesWhy Certificate Rotation Matters to Your Kubernetes and OpenShift Clusters’ Security
February 8, 2021
In a 2019 survey, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that a majority (84%) of respondents were running containers in production. That’s 15% more than the previous year. CNCF also learned that the percentage of organizations running 250 or more containers in production was up 28%. So, why is this happening? Organizations are increasingly […]