Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Listen In To The 8th Annual IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It’s that time of the year again when HelpSystems reveals the results of its annual IBM i Marketplace Survey, which believe it or not has now been done eight years in a row. The survey provides a snapshot into the thinking of IBM i shops all over the world as they contemplate the strategic and tactical issues relating to their mission critical applications and the security, resilience, capacity, economics, and long-term viability of the IBM i platform that supports them.
Personally, I sincerely wish that HelpSystems had been doing this survey since the AS/400 was launched in 1988, because it …
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Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.
To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …
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IT Spending Growth To Slow In The Coming Years
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a weird couple of years for IT organizations due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. So many normal patterns have been disrupted that it is sometimes hard to imagine that things can go back to, well, normal. But if the analysts at Gartner are correct, then 2022 will be the year that IT departments start thinking about the future again instead of triaging problems caused by the pandemic, and it will also be a time of more conservative IT spending growth.
Last week, Gartner put out its revised IT spending figures for 2021 and also updated …
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Some Good Advice About Log4j Mitigation Gotchas
January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Apache Log4j logging utility written in Java and available since the end of the Dot Com Boom in early 2001, has been installed far and wide into many systems and systems software packages in the more than two decades it has been available. And that is why the zero-day security vulnerability discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and revealed on December 9 has caused so much concern.
Log4j is everywhere and that means the Log4Shell vulnerability that Alibaba described makes it particularly scary. But before we get into some of the mitigation advice that …
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Recent IBM i Redbook Roundup
January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Say what you will about IBM, but it puts out a lot of technical information compared to its peers in the systems business, and always has. The techies at Big Blue and its many business partners expend a great deal of effort to put good technical information about Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform out there to help people better understand, run, and manage their applications and systems.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we perused the IBM Redbook library on your behalf and now present to you a roundup of the most …
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IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database
January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.
The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …
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The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.
There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …
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The Great Resignation Intersects Application Modernization And Digital Transformation
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Depending on how you want to look at it, today is March 680, 2020, or January 10, 2022. It is too early to tell if it is actually a new year or just the penultimate one stretched out unnaturally by biological circumstance. We remain hopeful that 2022 will represent something of a return to normal, but we also know that we can never return to the way things were in 2019. Too many people have had too much time to think about their careers, and a very large number of people are considering job changes or have already jumped ship …
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IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue might have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip fabrication operation to GlobalFoundries many years ago, but that does not mean that the company does not still do a reasonably large amount of fundamental research into chip maker techniques and tricks. Transistor, chip, and packaging research and development is a big portion of the patent portfolio at IBM and continues to be so because Big Blue still has some of the smartest chipheads on the planet working for it because IBM wants to ensure there is a roadmap for future Power and System z processors and because it can …
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How Much Software Budget Does AI Drive?
December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Fake brain-like software based on neural networks is all the rage now, and probably will be for the next decade or so, but you may be surprised at how much money is being spent on software that has some sort of AI embedded in it and also to learn what a small piece of the overall IT market that this AI software represents at this point in IT history.
The market researchers and prognosticators at Gartner recently tried to case the AI software market, and looked at how much money the top five use cases for software that have AI …
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