• Guru: Getting Yum And Bash Up And Running

  March 15, 2021 Rob McNelly

  In the March 1 edition of The Four Hundred, I noted that an emphasis on things like system/application modernization and open source solutions gives IBM i newcomers a degree of comfort with the platform. I also made the point that no matter how long you or I have been at this, there are always people, young or not so young, who are new to the platform and come to this site seeking introductory information about various tasks and capabilities.

  With this in mind, I want to delve further into open source for those who are new to it. As …

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• IBM i Bucking The Trends, Year After Year

  March 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are all kinds of stability that we consider when we choose and use systems. In the IBM i market in particular, we often talk about stability in the sense of the good programming practices that companies or their third-party software vendors have for the applications that they run. Or we might talk about the underlying stability of the operating system, relational database, or middleware software on which these applications depend. Or digging down further, we might talk about the reliability and longevity and predictability of the Power Systems hardware that underlies it all. And then, of course, there is …

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• We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

  March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …

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• Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.

  The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …

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• IBM Extends Dynamic Capacity Pricing Scheme To Its Cloud

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What if you could buy computer processing credits from a systems vendor and use the credits to run workloads on your on-premise server or in the vendor’s cloud? Better yet, what if the vendor was IBM and the workloads were IBM i applications? Because that is essentially the hybrid computing pricing structure that IBM unveiled yesterday as part of its latest Power Systems announcements.

  The new hybrid pricing option is an extension of the so-called Dynamic Capacity pricing scheme that IBM unveiled through its Power Private Cloud offering, which IBM launched in May 2020. As part of that offering, …

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• Tech Data’s Take On Certified Pre-Owned IT Gear

  February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be ironic, but even the largest sellers of new datacenter equipment in the world sometimes have to – and eagerly want to – sell used IT equipment. And if they are smart – and the executives at Tech Data certainly are on behalf of their downstream reseller and end user customers – they stick to certified pre-owned equipment with the backing of the original equipment manufacturers.

  When Tech Data was founded in Clearwater, Florida by Edward Raymond in 1974, the company sold various peripherals and supplies for minicomputer and mainframe systems. The company branched out into PC distribution …

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• IBM i on Google Cloud Appears To Be Stuck in Alpha

  February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Companies that want to run IBM i workloads in Google Cloud will have to wait a bit longer, as the public cloud service is still in limited alpha, with no signs that it will become generally available any time soon.

  It has been close to three years since we first broke the news about the partnership between IBM and Google Cloud. At the inaugural POWERUp conference in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2018, IBM i chief architect Steve Will publicly discussed plans the two companies had made to run IBM i and AIX instances on the Power Systems servers …

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• Power Systems Security: More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

  February 17, 2021 Tony Perera

  The IBM i platform is no longer an island unto itself. In many companies, there is a diversity of different systems — Unix systems, Linux servers, and Windows environments, not to mention IBM i. Each of these environments brings its own strength and weakness. The goal is to not let these differences hurt something that’s important to you: security.

  Make no mistake: It’s a good thing that Power Systems servers can run multiple operating systems. From an IBM i perspective, it ensures more R&D dollars from IBM to support the hardware. It seems doubtful IBM would spend billions to develop …

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• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

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• IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.

  As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …

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