IBM is celebrating 35 years of its midrange platform next month, and there is no doubt it will be an exciting moment for the IBM i community. But there’s another occasion you might not be aware of: the 20th annual State of IBM i Security Study, which was issued last month by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems).| IT Jungle
HelpSystems last week officially unveiled its annual State of IBM i Security report, the 18th straight year for the series. Like with past reports, the 2022 version highlights some of the continuing challenges that IBM i customers face when trying to secure their systems. A few key areas stand out above the rest. The IBM| IT Jungle
First, the good news: IBM i shops are paying more attention to security and are making it a priority, according to the 2020 State of IBM i Security Study. But that isn’t necessarily translating into better security, as too much data remains vulnerable, the new report concludes. “A deeper understanding of the risks and the| IT Jungle
We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to| IT Jungle
We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the| IT Jungle
In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how the Power Systems division had a new vice president of product management – to be specific, Bargav Balakrishnan, who has spent decades in various technical and management roles within Big Blue. Balakrishnan takes over from Steve Sibley, who has been steering Power| IT Jungle
We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a| IT Jungle
Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything| IT Jungle
“I love it when a plan comes together.” – Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, The A Team. Look, we take our wisdom and our joy where we can find it here at The Four Hundred, and it does indeed look like Big Blue has a plan that is coming together with regards to generative AI and| IT Jungle
It looks like IBM is getting pushback from customers and partners who are not happy about an announcement it made earlier this year to lock down access to licensed internal code for System z mainframes, Power Systems, and various storage arrays based on Power7 machinery. As The Four Hundred reported back in February, in announcement| IT Jungle
Skills depletion within the IBM i community has been well documented on these pages in issues past. Another side effect of working on an older computer platform is the aging of the software vendor community itself. As the baby boomer owners approach retirement age, a handful of industry consolidators are eager to give the software| IT Jungle
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine.| IT Jungle
It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the| IT Jungle
Today is Power11 announcement day, and as sometimes happens during the debut of a new processor and a new platform to go along with it, we do not have all of the details necessary to tell you everything you need to know about the new Power11 processor and the four of the five Power Systems| IT Jungle
Faced with ever-growing security concerns, IBM i shops are “attacking” the problem and taking real steps to improve their security posture, Fortra says in its latest State of IBM i Security study. It is the second straight year that Fortra has noticed an improvement in IBM i shops’ approach to security. However, there are still| IT Jungle
Brace yourself because the IBM i platform has five security vulnerabilities that you have to analyze and cope with in this week’s issue of the IBM i PTF Guide. Let’s just jump right in and get to it. First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server is affected by arbitrary code execution (CVE-2025-36038), about| IT Jungle
Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter. Not only that,| IT Jungle
While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system. This is particularly true of| IT Jungle
At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers,| IT Jungle
Brace yourselves, everyone. There are seven security vulnerabilities that you have to pay attention to this week for the IBM i platform. Remember, as security guru Carol Woodbury is fond of saying: the IBM i platform is not the most secure platform in the world, but the most securable platform in the world. You must| IT Jungle
Welcome to May, and we start out with PH65941, a notice from Big Blue that IBM WebSphere Application Server is vulnerable to server-side request forgery (CVE-2025-27907 CVSS 4.1). You can check out this link for more details. IBM says that the fix for this APAR is set to be included with WebSphere Application Server 8.5.5.28| IT Jungle
Just a reminder that as part of the April 8 announcements, IBM Software Support content is changing to require entitlement check for software patches. See more at this link, but the gist of it is that IBM Software Support Troubleshooting, Question & Answer, and How To documents are changing to require entitlement. This means that| IT Jungle
Timothy Prickett Morgan is President of Guild Companies Inc and Editor in Chief of The Four Hundred.| IT Jungle
It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the| IT Jungle
Big Blue today announced IBM i 7.6, the first new release of the operating system in three years. While version 7.6 brings a range of enhancements, arguably the biggest new feature is the addition of multi-factor authentication directly into the operating system, which will make adopting MFA simple and represent a “massive security improvement” at| IT Jungle
Good day, good people of IBM i Land. This week we start out with two security vulnerabilities and a known issue to beware of the BLOB! Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities. First we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Netty (CVE-2025-25193), which you| IT Jungle
Last week, we went over the roadmaps for the future Power11 processor from IBM and its follow-on, the Power Next chip that we presume will be called Power 12 because, you know, history. This week we want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the Power11 strategy and what this might mean| IT Jungle
