If you want to have a conversation with IBM‘s Doug Balog about i on Power, be prepared for Linux on Power to be part of the discussion. The two are inseparable when you’re the person running the Power Systems business, which, by the way, is exactly what Balog does. The reason i and Linux are inseparable is because they are each very good at different things and they need one another to be good at everything.

Balog sees Linux on Power as the answer to every aspect of the systems of engagement. He sees IBM i and AIX as

It happened once. Could it happen again? Many IT Jungle readers recall IBM‘s decision to converge the System i and System p lines, which resulted in Power Systems. A shared Power processor and common system architecture for both platforms was a business choice that made sense at the bean-counter level. And at the technology level, there would not be a lot of blood on the floor. The savings over the long haul would be the salve that healed all wounds.

There was a time when the convergence of those two lines was unimaginable, much like the conventional thinking today

A significant percentage of IBM i professionals are adopting technologies like PHP and SQL to boost their modernization strategies, according to a recent survey conducted by Zend. The survey says that 70 percent of IBM i pros are using PHP at their shops. But perhaps more surprising was the finding that 67 percent of respondents said they were using the SQL engine in DB2 for i, nearly twice as many who reported using the old DDL approach.

Zend began the survey at the spring COMMON event and continued it through the summer from the Zend website. All in all,

Ebola transmission, medical authorities assure us, occurs only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or animal. And even then, the virus can only enter the body through a crack in the skin or by coming in contact with mucus membranes. While there is no reason to doubt the veracity of that assertion, I found it difficult to square with the surprising number of medical professionals who have contracted the disease even though clad in full protective attire. I wondered if the virus was being transmitted in some other way?

My suspicions were probably a result

Starting on November 18, IBM will begin shipping a slew of new disk and flash drive features for Power Systems machines. The company is also previewing support for various I/O and storage devices that it will make available for the new enterprise-class E870 and E880 machines that were announced a few weeks ago. IBM is also making special versions of the scale-out Power8 machines available with hardened enclosures and DC power for telcos and other service providers that need such special gear.

All of the new features and the statements of direction are outlined in announcement letter 114-170. Most

Krengel Technology, a custom software company in the IBM i community since 1996, is getting into the Ruby on Rails Web development/application modernization business. And if you’ve been paying attention to Rudy and Rails and how they apply to IBM midrange shops, you won’t be surprised to hear that Aaron Bartell is in the middle of Krengel’s plans. Bartell was instrumental in getting Ruby on Rails ported to IBM i and supported beginning with Technology Refresh 7 of the i 7.1 release. Now the time has come to see if the IBM i community is ready for Ruby.

For

In last week’s issue, The Four Hundred told you all about two cloud controller programs IBM had updated in its Cloud Manager and Cloud Orchestrator tools, both derived from different editions of the OpenStack cloud controller, for managing virtualized compute and storage on Power-based systems. IBM has also updated its more basic PowerVC tool as part of the October Power Systems announcements.

Power Virtualization Center, or PowerVC for short, made its debut this time last year and was created explicitly to replace the VMControl functions that were part of the generic Systems Director tool that IBM was trying to span

The importance of IT infrastructure is the nail that Big Blue keeps hammering regardless of whether the topic is cloud, analytics, mobile, or social (CAMS)–which are topics IBM likes to talk about almost as much as infrastructure. Well, the reality is that any one of the CAMS topics requires some attention be paid to infrastructure, because the overwhelming majority of organizations do not have the infrastructure in place to handle cloud, analytics, mobile, or social deployments.

In a recently released IBM report on infrastructure based on a survey of 750 IT executives around the world, only 10 percent say their

Integrated has been the word that has applied to the AS/400 even before IBM rebranded it as the iSeries back in the late 1990s and then the System i before the Power Systems convergence back in 2008. The ideas embodied in the AS/400 are being employed in a new generation of systems, including Big Blue’s own PureSystems machines.

The latter is based on the Flex System machinery that is now controlled by Lenovo Group. And the markets for integrated infrastructure, the base iron that includes servers, storage, and storage all in one box, and integrated platforms, which include systems

IBM has made it pretty clear that it wants more Power Systems customers to adopt Linux for certain parts of their workloads in addition to selling more Power8 systems to customers with Linux workloads that might otherwise buy X86 systems. IBM’s European unit is actually doing something about it to try to push Linux.

In announcement letter ZA14-1126, IBM Europe is giving customers a discount on a Linux support subscription license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The price is pretty cheap: €1, or about $1.28 in U.S. dollars or about 79 pence in British