TFH Volume: 29 Issue: 73 Archives

Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says

December 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i and mainframe professionals who have grown weary of defending their systems against people who want to replace them with more “modern” X86 and cloud platforms found an unlikely ally in the form of Gartner, which earlier this year published a report that cautioned against making rash, emotionally charged technological decisions when it comes to big iron migrations.

“Replacing existing systems because people perceive them to be old can be a costly mistake,” Gartner senior analyst Thomas Klinect and vice president Mike Chuba wrote in a March piece titled Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May …
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Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …
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Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

December 9, 2019 Ted Holt

You are busy. The people you serve need you to do more than one human being can do. You don’t have time to look for comments or updates to the articles we run in this august publication or any other. For this reason, I was pleased to publish some of your feedback in last week’s issue. This week I am pleased to share a bit more.

In response to Guru: MERGE, Chicken, and Eggs, John asked a good question and made a good point:

How is using this merge technique under commitment control any different than just doing the …
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As I See It: When Gates Was Young

December 9, 2019 Victor Rozek

You would have to be of a certain age to remember how excited and optimistic users once were about computer technology. It all seems Paleolithic by today’s standards, but those heavy boxes and bulky monitors were wondrous tools and novel toys in their day. Technology transformed us into Harry Potter and a personal computer became our magic stick.

My first computer was a PS/2. No, not a PlayStation, an IBM Personal System/2 that boasted a whopping 2 MB of RAM and 20 MB of disk storage – who could ever need anything more? It also contained a VGA graphic cards. …
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Servers Cool A Bit In Q3, But The Market Is Still Hot

December 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

All temperatures are relative. While the appetite for servers cooled a bit in the third quarter, according to the latest statistics from IDC, the decline is relatively modest and the period ended up still being one of the largest in history, thanks in large part to the appetite of hyperscalers and cloud builders for zillions of X86 servers.

The declines were much more intense for midrange and big iron systems, which is typical given the product cycles from IBM. The Power9 chip is about halfway through its product cycle, and the System z15 mainframe was only announced a few weeks …
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Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says

Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

As I See It: When Gates Was Young

Servers Cool A Bit In Q3, But The Market Is Still Hot

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