Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i
June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.
On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …
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Certified Pre-Owned Storage: More Than Just A Pretty Price
June 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
People tend to think first and foremost about servers when they think of IT infrastructure, but a true system, even if it is a monolithic, standalone server with as few as one or as many as 16 sockets, always includes storage. And in distributed systems that can grow beyond the scale up limits of NUMA machines and scale out to add compute capacity, they always include storage (whether converged on the server nodes or run alongside the cluster on the network) and they also always include networking.
No matter what, storage is a big component of every enterprise system, ranging …
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Taking A Centralized Approach To IBM i Security
June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are branching out and doing new things here at IT Jungle, and one of them is using video as well as text to get information about the IBM i platform across. Video is certainly not a new thing, and we have done a bit of it as part of consulting engagements, but starting now it is going to be part of what we do on an ongoing basis. We are grateful to IBM i security and high availability software vendor Precisely for initially supporting us in this endeavor.
For our first video interview, we sat down with John Vanderwall, …
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Get Virtually Packed For Common Europe Power Summer Camp
June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The world is still not in the swing of things when it comes to business travel, trade shows, and conferences, and in many ways that is a good thing because events that were not physically accessible to many of us are now virtually accessible. Provided that you can deal with some time zone changes from time to time.
Such is the case with Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition, which is running live on the Internet June 14, 15, and 17. No, that is not a typo, the event is skipping a day on June 16, perhaps to …
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A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning
May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.
This is …
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IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors
May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …
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Talking Shop With Power Systems Chief Stephen Leonard
May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whether or not you were aware of it, the Cognitive Systems division of IBM – what we still colloquially call Power Systems here at IT Jungle and what everyone else still calls it for the most part – has had a new general manager for quite some time and we had not yet had a chance to talk to the new chief. But recently we did hop on the Zoom with Stephen Leonard to get some insight about the Power Systems business and how it fits into the new and evolving IBM and the rapidly changing IT sector.
Leonard dates …
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Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Web Development Trends To Watch In the Second Half
May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to believe, but in terms of budgets and thinking, within six weeks we will be entering the second half of 2021, a turning point year if there ever was one, and perhaps an inflection point for 2021 itself and thus for the next decade or so.
The need to modernize is not lost on most IBM i shops, but it seems like there’s a new web technology to learn each week. It’s no surprise that getting started with Web development is a stumbling block in itself. That’s why vendors like Fresche are working to demystify Web development …
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A Cornucopia Of Compute
May 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Ever since the advent of file servers in the 1980s, the rise of client/server system architectures in the early 1990s, and the commercialization of Internet networking in the middle 1990s, AS/400 shops and those using the progeny of that venerable IBM midrange computer have had hybrid computing platforms in the datacenter. Meaning, a mix of processor architectures and operating systems other than OS/400 or IBM i that was in some fashion associated with or actually doing mission critical work.
In fact, as you all well know, there is in aggregate more raw compute in the X86 or RISC servers that …
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Major Bug In IBM i Access Client Solutions
May 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Stop. Don’t click that mouse or hit Enter just yet. There is a major bug in Access Client Solutions 1.1.8.7. Here is the story that we got from one of the many Dougs we know in the IBM i Rebel Alliance, in this case J Douglas Robertson, who is a certified maintainer of IBM Power Systems and who ran into the issue when doing the upgrade.
JD shares the workaround he figured out after the ACS console flew up its own port hole after the upgrade. These words are straight from his own mouth, in italics so you know JD …
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