THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. The Power11 Transistor Count Discrepancies Explained – Sort Of

   One of the perplexing things about the Power11 announcement is that we know that the differences in the logic and cache designs of the Power10 and the Power11 server chips are not huge, and yet the transistor count jumped by almost a power of two from the Power10 to the Power11.

   This didn’t make sense to us, and we said as much during the Power11 launch back in early July. (Our observations about transistor count discrepancies were made after our initial story ran and once we got our hands on the drafts for Power11 Redbooks. In those Redbooks, …

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2. Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

   When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

   It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

   According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past …

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3. Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

   Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

   ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

   IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

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4. New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

   A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

   The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 33

   It might be a good and convenient thing that the WebSphere Application Server, the Web server embedded in the IBM i platform two and a half decades ago and making it part of the Internet, is based on the open source Apache Web server. But it sure does have a lot of patches. The good news is that because it is open source, it is patched regularly and problems do not fester in obscurity.

   In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there are a slew of security vulnerabilities related to WebSphere, as there sometimes is. Let’s walk through them all. …

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