THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 28: A Crazy Number of Security Vulnerability Patches

   It looks like 28 is not your lucky number if you are an IBM i shop. The reason why is that in Volume 28 and Number 28 of the IBM i PTF Guide, Big Blue has released a truly amazing number of security vulnerabilities and patches for the IBM i platform. We counted 40 security vulnerabilities, some of which are still awaiting patches, plus 22 High Impact/Pervasive (HIPER) patches for firmware on Power9, Power10, and Power11 systems. But a few items before we dive into that.

   First: The System Planning Tool, version 6.26.223.0, is now available for download at …

   The post IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 28: A Crazy Number of Security Vulnerability Patches appeared first on IT Jungle.

2. Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6

   IBM is making significant changes to how it handles encryption keys with IBM i 7.6. The big news is that IBM i shops now have bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support via IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering, which scratches a certain regulatory itch. But IBM has also bolstered how it handles master keys and save/restore keys stored on the IBM i server, which boosts security, but also makes IPLs following DR events more complicated.

   Let’s start with the new bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support for IBM i in IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering. IBM Key Protect is a cloud-based key management …

   The post Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6 appeared first on IT Jungle.

3. FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It

   Way back in the Dot Com boom, when FalconStor was founded, it was one of the early innovators of what we have come to know as software-defined storage and software-defined networking as well as disaggregated storage. These terms were not even coined until a decade after FalconStor was doing it in its first product, called IPStor, which is the foundation of the various products that the company still sells today.

   Like many companies, including IBM itself, FalconStor had some self-imposed business issues and financial challenges over the years – IBM in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, FalconStor in …

   The post FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It appeared first on IT Jungle.

4. Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip

   Today’s tip comes to us from Claude, as in the AI chatbot created by Anthropic. I don’t need to introduce him. Many readers of this august publication are far better acquainted with him than I am. I have heard reports of IBM i programmers who have quit writing source code, telling Claude to write it for them. Some folks seem to be right proud of that fact. Furthermore, I’m told that some places no longer allow humans to write source code.

   I had a few ideas in mind for this article and was weighing the merits of each one when …

   The post Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip appeared first on IT Jungle.

5. Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty

   For all that large language models (LLMs) are really good at – and they are great at a few things – understanding large reports generated by IBM i servers and System Z mainframes is not one of them. A Southern California company called Astera has identified this gap and developed its own AI-based tool for extracting information from this valuable resource.

   Foundation AI models and LLMs are probabilistic systems, and they work best in the gray zones: Inputting words and images, and outputting other words and images that are similar to the originals that it was trained on but not …

   The post Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty appeared first on IT Jungle.