[eBook] 9 Things You Need to Know About POWER9

The POWER9 is the latest and greatest system IBM has to offer. But what can it do for your business?

This eBook will cover:

• How the POWER9 infrastructure is built for the digital age
• How POWER9 performance compares to previous models
• About the migration process from POWER7 or POWER8
• The overall benefits of POWER9 and how it can make a difference for your business

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5 Ways To Protect Your Sensitive Data on IBM i

Regulations (FISMA, HIPPA, SOX, and more) are forcing companies to evaluate how they protect their sensitive data. Industries such as finance, insurance, and healthcare have the most pressure to comply with these regulations which are geared towards protecting consumers private information.  The issue is that companies may not understand how to properly secure their data to protect their consumers.

Any good security plan takes a layered approach to protect data.  You have to consider where the data resides and how someone could gain access to it.  Then you have to put controls in place to ensure that you put as many roadblocks in place as possible to prevent unauthorized access.

There are many approaches you can take to ensure you are complying with regulations and protecting your companies information.

Below are five ways to protect your sensitive data. [CONTINUE READING]

IBM i Managed Services: System Health

As I wrap up my Managed Services series for 2018 and prepare for 2019, I want to end by talking about system health. A common misperception about MSP is that all the hardware being used by our customers is hosted. In fact, the vast majority of the systems under our care are the existing hardware in the shops we support.

As we all know, the IBM i runs well and can be trusted to do so with little intervention. Consequently, there are many factors that aren’t analyzed regularly that can have drastic impacts on the functioning of the machine. We provide this information to our customers via two services:

1. Standalone health checks
2. System status overviews

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The Value of Keeping Your IBM i Current

IBM i on IBM Power Servers is the best server platform in the universe. It is reliable, stable and provides all the tools needed to effectively operate and manage your mission-critical applications. Most of us on the platform fully agree. While this is an amazing accomplishment, it also has its downside. IBM i users have become complacent about the platform because they rarely have to worry about the hardware and operating system.  It just works. They even forget it exists.

But even the best platform needs to stay current. Why?

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How to Fix WRKPRB: “Software problem data for QYCDCUSG has been logged.”

Have you ever seen on your system in WRKPRB: “Software problem data for QYCDCUSG has been logged.”?

Normally this indicates an expired server certificate or an expired Certificate Authority certificate.

You should take the following steps to correct the problem:

1. Go into DCM (Digital Certificate Manager), in browser go to: your system IP address:2004

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End of Life for IBM POWER6 and POWER7

If you run IBM i on IBM Power Systems, this will hopefully come as a friendly reminder. IBM will be discontinuing hardware support on POWER6 machines at end of Q1 2019 and for POWER7 at end of Q3 2019.  You can find details on servers affected by the service discontinuation in the below announcement.

Services withdrawal: Declaration of a plan to discontinue lease, rental, and maintenance services for selected machines IBM United States Withdrawal Announcement 917-163 – September 19, 2017

What This Means

For the folks still running on older P6 and P7 machines, it is important that you make a transition to newer POWER8 and POWER9 systems or find other ways to adapt. Companies who plan on taking a reactive stance on this will be exposed to greater security and reliability risks after support is removed on these machines.  If you are sitting on old hardware you must find new ways to ensure these systems continue running reliably.

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Release levels and PTFs

People are always asking me how often they should be performing PTF maintenance, and when is the right time to upgrade their operating system. I updated this article from last month with the current levels of PTFs. Let’s look at PTFs. First, PTFs are Program Temporary Fixes that are created by IBM to fix a problem that has occurred or to possibly prevent a problem from occurring. In addition, some times PTFs add new functionality, security, or improve performance. Therefore, I am always dumbfounded as to why customers do not perform PTF maintenance on their machine at least quarterly.

If IBM has come out with a fix for your disk drives, why do you want to wait for your disk drive to fail with that problem, only to be told that there is a fix for that problem, and if you had applied the PTF beforehand, you would have averted the problem. Therefore, I think a quarterly PTF maintenance strategy is a smart move. Many of our customers are on our quarterly PTF maintenance program, and that provides them with the peace of mind of knowing their system is up to date on PTFs. Below is a table of the major group PTFs for the last few releases. This is what we are installing for our customers on iTech Solutions Quarterly Maintenance program.

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