Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance is what gives companies …
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Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
During a normal holiday season, family and friends are our refuge from the adversities and tribulations of the world. And this year, we need our people more than ever and we can’t have them.
It’s peculiar, and we all have similar stories of how we cannot see and embrace the people who we are closest to because we have to quarantine. It is hard to say if we are overreacting or not, but for many of us, there is a small margin of error and so we err on the side of caution.
For those of you who have lost …
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Some Confusion Around IBM i 7.1 And IBM i 7.2 Support
December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of writing last week’s discussion about how Big Blue would be supporting the IBM i operating system, database, and systems software stack out to 2032 and beyond, I discovered some anomalies in the documentation that IBM has put out regarding extended support for specific IBM i releases.
For many customers, getting beyond IBM i 7.1 is impossible for various reasons, which we have discussed in the past. Some of the reasons are technical – customers have lost their source code and they can’t tweak it to run on more modern releases of hardware and software, or their …
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Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter
December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.
We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …
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To 2032 . . . And Beyond!
December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …
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Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?
December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:
- JIT Compiler
- Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
- LSP Enforcement
- Resource “Classes”
- Assertion behavior
- XML-RPC is now in PECL
- Reflection changes
This is …
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Breathing New Life Into Your POWER7 And POWER7+ Systems
November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is a hard lesson for people to learn, but savvy IT organizations certainly do learn it – some decades ago, some only now. And that lesson is that not every application slowdown and performance bottleneck in a system is directly related to the clock speed or throughput of the central processor. While the processors are indeed central, a system is comprised of main memory, storage, and network I/O, and tuning up a machine as many times as not means bolstering these other components to help the CPU better do the job that is latent in its particular feeds and …
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Resilience In The Platform, Resilience In The Business
November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The coronavirus pandemic is making it clear just how dependent much of the global economy is on mobility, entertainment, travel, and hospitality. But it is also making it clear that many parts of the economy, thanks to IT infrastructure, are resilient and are coping with the stresses and strains.
“The need to rapidly innovate has clearly become apparent,” Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, explained in his keynote at the recent Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event. “And we will continue to do that for AIX, IBM i and Linux,” Sibley said, …
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Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA
November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a truth in this world that you get what you pay for, and it is absolutely true for the systems that companies buy to support SAP’s HANA in-memory database and their applications for data warehousing and online transaction processing.
It is no secret to the Power Systems faithful that IBM’s Power architecture has consistently offered reliability, availability, and serviceability features in both the processor and the system architecture that are superior to X86 alternatives. And the Power Systems platform also offers superior compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth benefits on top of that, which absolutely justifies the …
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IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11
November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.
When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …
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