As many of you know, most of us at IT Jungle have advocated for some form of support for the Windows Server platform on Power-based systems since the advent of the PowerPC Alliance nearly 25 years ago. Back then, there really wasn’t a Windows Server platform at all, in fact, and it was not until that alliance that two things became clear: Microsoft had aspirations as a system software provider, and it intended to start down that road by making its Windows desktop operating system available on Power, Alpha, MIPS, and X86 processors.

Except for a few months in the

The IBM midrange community is full of normal people trying to keep the lid on a can of worms and make a living. In the pursuit of what should be two simple and compatible objectives, there’s a lot of fancy dancing going on. What has to get done today overrides the broader view of what could be done. The IBM i development team rolls out Technology Refreshes, but relatively few take notice.

On Friday, November 20, Technology Refresh (TR) 11 for IBM i 7.1 and TR 3 for IBM i 7.2 will become generally available, or GA in the lingo

One of the biggest technology shifts in history–the move to cloud computing–is currently occurring. But technology pros at many organizations–in particular those running IBM i servers–are fearful about what a move to the cloud will mean for them and their organization. The good news, says Denovo Ventures CTO Richard Dolewski, is that IBM i pros can make the move on their own terms.

The cloud is still fairly new to most IBM i professionals. While IBM i cloud deployments are growing, arguably less than 10 percent of IBM i workloads are cloud-based at this time. However, all signs point to

IBM’s Watson said the main themes of Bob Dylan‘s song lyrics were that time passes and love fades. Dylan said this sounded about right. Both were kidding: The obvious point of the television commercial featuring this insipid exchange between machine and man was that there are no fools like old fools.

Mr. Dylan, for non-AARP folk, was a pop music icon decades ago, when IBM was the emperor of computing; today, Dylan, a wrinkled old fart, is at best the second most important living entertainer from Minnesota, long since eclipsed by the timely and relevant Garrison Keillor.

Almost every IBM midrange shop faces integration issues. The next piece of the IT puzzle has to fit in with existing environment, or the system that was functional 15 years ago requires modernization to make it functional today and into the foreseeable future. You’re lucky if you are only dealing with one piece of the puzzle at a time. In fact, that rarely happens. You have to sort through a pile of priorities and make a plan. You need a road map.

Integration lessons come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes we learn quickly and