• IBM i In The Land Of The Rising Sun

  November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It took Europe and Japan a long time to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, but it is absolutely no coincidence that the United States alone or in combination with its NATO allies invested an enormous amount of money in the rebuilding of both of these nations. Not only was it good business, providing American manufacturers new markets into which to sell their products, it was also a good kind of cultural exchange.

  The predecessor of IBM, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, sold its first punch card machine into the Japanese market back in 1925 at Nippon Pottery – yes, …

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• I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

  November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

  All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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• The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.

  Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …

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• Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

  Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

  Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …

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• IBM’s Own Positioning Of Power Systems Revealed

  September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get a lot of data about how the Power Systems business is doing out of Big Blue these days, and we get even less, in terms of specifics, about the markets that IBM is chasing and how well or poorly it thinks it is doing in this regard. We get a snippet here and there from the quarterly results, we get some insight from the quarterly market trackers from IDC and Gartner, but not much else.

  Digging around through some documents relating to the Power9 rollout, we stumbled across a few interesting charts that gives us at least …

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