• IBM Updates CMOD for i

  December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that run Content Manager OnDemand for i now have the option of using several new “premium features” in non-production environments, IBM announced last week.

  CMOD is a scalable program that’s used by IBM i shops to capture, index, store, and distribute a large number of business documents, such as credit card statements, utility bills, explanation of benefits, check images, and trade confirmations. The software typically serves as a long-term archive for documents that in the past would have been handled with paper or microfiche.

  On Tuesday, IBM announced new features for CMOD for i 7.4. Specifically, IBM …

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• AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?

  December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?

  AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.

  These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …

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• New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

  November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

  IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …

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• A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.

  The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …

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• A Year Later: Diving Deeper into How Connectria Brings IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 17, 2021 David Wilderman

  Connectria has worked in the IBM i and AIX hosting business since 2000. We have strong expertise in both IBM and cloud; we’ve offered IBM i private cloud services and support for more than a decade. We work with a great deal of Power Systems users who are making strides toward the cloud, as many have in the last year thanks to soaring cloud demand in the wake of the pandemic.

  Traditionally, we have helped IBM users by augmenting their existing staff as they retire or turnover by handling production workloads and delivering managed services with capability, not just hardware. …

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• Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.

  But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …

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• Guru: Physical System Performance

  November 15, 2021 Dawn May

  Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …

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• IBM Adds ServicePacs For Power Machine Setup, Other Tweaks

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The legacy IBM Company from decades gone by charged a hell of a lot for its systems and offered a slew of handholding to make it all worthwhile. Somewhere along the way, service became a profit center and a revenue driver instead of an attitude about customer service, and you can’t entirely blame IBM because time is money and people don’t obey Moore’s Law economics.

  The ServicePac offerings that Big Blue has put together in recent years, which cover just about every aspect of its hardware and software stack, seem like a mix of old and new. Yes, the services …

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