IBM Systems Magazine Blogs

Last week, I revisited a topic that I find revitalizing: Middleware. In my previous post, I discussed the roots of middleware in what I referenced as the real history of middleware, with the real roots being in centralized enterprise systems. This week, I’ll continue with a discussion of the categories or taxonomy of middleware software and the size of the market.

In a world filled with side-channel attacks, it’s not sufficient to simply encrypt data and ignore the environment around that encrypted data. Secure Service Containers go beyond encrypting data, and remove attack vectors that attempt to go around that encryption. 

On the road again. Nothing surprising about that because I travel internationally two or more times a month. What is unusual is that this year about half of my trips are security related (the other main topic is performance although I prefer the term resource optimization).

Quite often, I’m asked how open source deliveries are prioritized at IBM. The answer isn’t simple. Even after we estimate the cost of a project, there are many factors to consider. For instance, does it enable a specific solution to run? Does it expand a programming language’s abilities? Is it highly-requested by the community or vendors?

Collection Services is always running on your system and you can use the Performance Data Investigator with Collection Services data for insights into your prestart jobs.

We mentioned in our second article on DATA-INTO that " ... we look forward to seeing what third parties and open-source groups can do with it." Well soon after that piece was published we received good news and bad news. The good news was that Scott Klement had added a DATA-INTO JSON parser to his port of YAJL. That’s also the bad news: Now Jon has to come up with a new project as that was number one on his to-do list!

In the past few months, my team has been receiving many questions about Java, and especially about the support of Java, because of announcements Oracle has made about changes to how they will be supporting their versions of Java 8. We’ve had enough questions that we thought we ought to just publish something that clarifies what IBM i clients need to know about Java and its support options.

After 28 years of working with IBM Db2 for z, and almost 11 years writing the DB2utor blog for IBM Systems Magazine, I’m saying goodbye.

VIOS 3.1 is here, and now is the time to start planning your next move. Should you replace your hardware with new servers and do fresh VIOS installs on those machines, or would a gradual upgrade of your dual VIO servers make more sense? Get informed by digging into the numerous, valuable resources that have recently come out.