Timothy Prickett Morgan
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We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050
March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …
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Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.
As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …
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IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.
IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …
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Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.
The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …
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Tech Data’s Take On Certified Pre-Owned IT Gear
February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be ironic, but even the largest sellers of new datacenter equipment in the world sometimes have to – and eagerly want to – sell used IT equipment. And if they are smart – and the executives at Tech Data certainly are on behalf of their downstream reseller and end user customers – they stick to certified pre-owned equipment with the backing of the original equipment manufacturers.
When Tech Data was founded in Clearwater, Florida by Edward Raymond in 1974, the company sold various peripherals and supplies for minicomputer and mainframe systems. The company branched out into PC distribution …
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Looking For Some Insight On IBM i Security
February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question that one of the biggest challenges for IT infrastructure and the applications that frolic atop it is making it the whole shebang secure. And with companies needing to provide more access to systems with users being remote and new ways of allowing customers to directly place orders, rather than through normal distribution channels thanks to the acceleration of trends caused by the coronavirus pandemic, making sure IBM i systems are secure has never been more necessary.
Oh, and did we mention that the Internet is a hostile environment, if not an outright war zone?
People need …
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Looking For Some Insight On IBM i Security
February 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question that one of the biggest challenges for IT infrastructure and the applications that frolic atop it is making it the whole shebang secure. And with companies needing to provide more access to systems with users being remote and new ways of allowing customers to directly place orders, rather than through normal distribution channels thanks to the acceleration of trends caused by the coronavirus pandemic, making sure IBM i systems are secure has never been more necessary.
Oh, and did we mention that the Internet is a hostile environment, if not an outright war zone?
People need …
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Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack
February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.
(For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …
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What Does This Year Look Like For IT Spending?
February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those who run businesses always keep two sets of data in their heads. One set is how their own business is doing relative to itself over past months, quarters, and years. And the other is how the economy at large is doing. Figuring out the correlation between the two, and what to do as these two data sets converge – or don’t – is essentially the task of upper management. It’s an art, not a science.
Around this time every year, we like to take a survey of what the big IT consultancies say in regard to IT spending to …
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Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops
February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.
It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …
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