Grab your coffee and bagel. Take 5 minutes to read the shortened IBM i news. There's some exciting IBM i news!

• IBM Clarifies IBM I 6.1.1 and Support Withdrawal
  By: Timothy Prickett Morgan
  Brief: "IBM i 6.1.1 will be withdrawn at the same time as its parent release, IBM i 6.1," says Alison Butterill, product offering manager for IBM I. IBM will stop marketing the product on December 9, 2014 and stop supporting it on September 30, 2015.
  Website: http://bit.ly/YGROrz

• TechTip: Lock and Lock
  By: Junlei Li
  Brief: Create a utility to lock specific object types that the Allocate Object (ALCOBJ) doesn't enable you to lock
  Website: http://bit.ly/1DRK8Dx

• Programs Tell the Truth: Retrieve the System Pointer to the PCS Object Associated with an MI Process
  By: Junlei Li
  Brief: Learn the technique that enables the operating system programs to locate the Work Control Block Table (WCBT) Entry of an active job in the WCBT via the job index and then retrieve the PCS pointer in the WCBTE
  Website: http://bit.ly/YUbCI8

• Practical Integration: Mounting NFS Drives
  By: Joe Pluta
  Brief: "I'm only going to talk about using the IBM i as an NFS client; that is, we'll copy a file from an IFS folder on the IBM i to a folder physically residing on another machine."
  Website: http://bit.ly/ZtYsTr

• How IBM Stacks Up Entry Power8 Machines Against X86 Iron
  By: Timothy Prickett Morgan
  Brief: Comparing Power8 system with Intel's "Haswell' Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors Website: http://bit.ly/1wRaf93

• Will VIOS Pushback Drive Direct-Attached Disk Comeback?
  By: Alex Woodie
  Brief: "VIOS brings benefits and drawbacks. Since it lowers the number of network adapters required to connect to a storage area network (SAN), it drives down costs and boosts efficiency of the physical I/O adapters that are left. As midrange IBM i shops adopt SANs--particularly the Storwize series, which are proving popular--they naturally gravitate toward VIOS to drive efficiency."
  Website: http://bit.ly/1sL3ojA

• Where Have All the IBM i ISVs Gone?
  By: Alex Woodie
  Brief: "The list of vendors that have gone out of business or been acquired is long and getting longer every year, and today we're likely down to fewer than 1,000 vendors."
  Website: http://bit.ly/1rgSGNG

• IBM Deals on V3700 Arrays, Preps Dedupe For FlashSystem
  By: Timothy Prickett Morgan
  Brief: "IBM is offering software function upgrades for the V3700 at no charge. The deal is applied to the Storwize Turbo performance boost, which cranks up the I/O operations per second on the array by 50 percent and doubles the maximum throughput as measured in gigabytes per second for the array."
  Website: http://bit.ly/1ry7wRp

• Town Considers AS/400 Replacement
  By: Dan Burger
  Brief: "The police department [of Sterling, Colorado] is leaning toward replacing its aging AS/400 server with a Windows-based system. The primary reason is for easier integration with other third-party programs, which are also Windows-based. New World Systems stands ready to assist with the migration. In addition to IBM i-based software, it develops and sells a Windows-based product."
  Website: http://bit.ly/1uW9tpD

• For the Love of Frank
  By: Dan Burger
  Brief: Frank Soltis aka Dr. Frank, an IBM certified legend, will be speaking this Thursday, Oct. 2 in a lead-off speaker series of webcases hosted by HelpSystems.
  You will learn more about:
  - The interrelated consequences of hardware changes and software developments - IBM i skill sets and their value
  - Optimizing data centers with system management tools
  - The impact of consolidation, regulations, and big data on IBM i
  Website: http://bit.ly/1ry9yAZ

• Database Modernization Exposes the Value in IBM i
  By: Raymond Everhart
  Brief: The key to successfully modernizing your database is to create a roadmap that includes these seven milestones:
  - Identify the candidates for modernization.
  - Determine the changes to be made to the tables.
  - Document and analyze the impact to your programs based upon the changes to be implemented.
  - Create the new tables and programs to be modified in a separate environment and validate the File Level Identifier.
  - Evaluate your data against the new tables in order to prepare and cleanse your data as necessary.
  - Create and execute a testing strategy that can be automated and repeated.
  - Build your implementation process.
  Website: http://bit.ly/1xufgY5