• Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

  October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

  “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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• An 11-Core Power9 Makes The Rounds, And Other Hardware Enhancements

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Those of us who go way back in the IBM midrange are used to rhythm in hardware announcements. In the early days, there were several announcements per year as new processors were rolled out across the product line and new peripherals for various kinds of storage and networking were rolled out. The pace was brisk back in the day, with nearly annual processor upgrades and associated updates to systems.

  These days, systems are really updated every three years or so, but still, there is the vestigial spring/fall announcement cadence when Big Blue now does Technology Refreshes for the IBM i …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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• IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

  We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

  In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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• IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

  IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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• Third Party Maintenance An Option As Power7 Goes EOL

  September 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Time is running out for IBM i shops with hardware support contracts for Power7 and Power7+ servers, which officially reach end of life (EOL) a week from today. For organizations that aren’t ready to migrate to newer Power8 or Power9 machines, there are third-party maintenance options that will let them keep running Power7 machines without abandoning the safety net.

  The September 30 EOL for Power7 hardware support not come as a surprise, as IBM has been talking about the event for two years. Big Blue has given its Power Systems customers plenty of time to upgrade from older systems, …

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• Relieving The Anxiety About IBM i Performance

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting a business is an exciting thing, and one of the most fundamental activities any of us can engage in as members of a capitalist economy. My adage has always been: Those who can work, must; those who can employ, must as well. I have faced my share of those moments, starting a business, with excitement and trepidation and hope. And now, our good friend and colleague, Doug Mewmaw, has hung out his shingle, which says Peak System Performance on it.

  Mewmaw, as you well know from reading The Four Hundred, is an expert on performance analysis and …

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• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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• IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.

  The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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