• Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.

  IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …

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• Reassessing IBM i Value: Worthless Iron or Legacy Goldmine?

  March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the minds of modern-day technologists, the IBM i server is relegated to the scrap bin of history, looked down upon as a vestigial organ of technology’s past with no place in the distributed future, where workloads run effortlessly on clouds and data flows seamlessly everywhere. That outlook gives the platform’s present value a low mark, but considering the recent influx of capital into IBM i ecosystem, one might want to reassess.

  Trying to assess the value of something is not an easy thing to do. When looking at the worth of the entire IBM i ecosystem, or even just …

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• Ensono Embiggens With Wipro Data Center Deal

  March 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Ensono isn’t the most well-known datacenter operator in the world, either in the open systems or mainframe/IBM i space where it currently operates. But thanks to its recently announced deal with Wipro to buy eight Wipro data centers for nearly half a billion dollars, the Chicago-based company is putting itself on the map.

  If the name Ensono is news to you, you are not alone. The company was formed just two years ago when Arkansas-based Acxiom spun out its IT Outsourcing (ITO) division to create a standalone entity with four data centers in the US, three in Europe, and $300 …

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• The Deal On Power9 Memory For Entry Servers

  March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of changes that come with any new Power Systems platform. But perhaps the biggest change – and one that will in some ways make the Power9 platform more competitive with X86 and ARM servers and in others less competitive – is the way IBM is shifting from buffered DDR3 and DDR4 main memory used in Power8 iron to plain vanilla registered DDR4 memory that is commonly used in all servers these days.

  Buffered memory had its heyday on high-end NUMA systems, and was necessary to try to balance the needs of memory bandwidth against ever-increasing compute …

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• IBM Patches ‘ROBOT’ Flaw in IBM i Crypto Library

  February 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM has issued patches to fix a serious security problem in the IBM Global Security Kit, or GSKit, a relatively obscure crypto package that implements SSL/TLS encryption algorithms across a variety of IBM products, including IBM i. An old flaw in the underlying RSA crypto algorithm that could let hackers decrypt data in a “side channel” attack has resurfaced under a new moniker: “ROBOT.”

  GSKit is an IBM toolkit that implements various encryption-related functions, including symmetric and asymmetric ciphers, random number generation, hashing algorithms, and encryption key management capabilities, for products that need over-the-wire encryption, including IBM i, Linux, and …

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• IBM Preps Power9 “ZZ” Systems For Imminent Launch

  February 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I told you that the market was getting restless for the rollout of the mainstream servers based on the Power9 processor, and Jenny Thomas, our publisher, commented on our @ITJungleNews Twitter feed that it was also me that was getting restless. Indeed, I am. My iron level is getting low, I suppose.

  Well, the good news for both you and me is that the “ZZ” variants of the Power Systems platforms, which we talked about last week based on the chatter we have been hearing, are coming sooner rather than later. …

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• IBM Power Champions: Showing Passion For The Platform

  February 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Having a job working on the IBM i-Power Systems platform isn’t easy. Compared to the vast Intel X86 ecosystem, IBM i folks make up a tiny, oft-overlooked minority. That’s one reason why it’s so important to have strong and passionate leaders that the wider installed based can look up to. Along that vein, last week IBM unveiled its 2018 class of Power Systems Champions, which includes a good number of passionate IBM i types.

  IBM named 60 Power Systems Champions for 2018. Out of those 60 Champions, 22 are new to the program, while 38 are returning. Twenty-six of the …

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• IBM Readies Mainstream Power9 Iron For Launch

  February 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The natives are getting restless, as my parents used to say when we were getting hungry. And the IBM i and AIX bases are definitely getting restless to know what Power9 iron that will be able to run Big Blue’s own operating systems in conjunction with the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor. They also want to know if IBM is going to give customers a big improvement in price/performance compared to Power7+ and Power8 machines that are still widely available in the channel.

  In short, they want to plan their future, and after four years of waiting, it is time.

  IBM …

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• IBM Winds Down Yet More Older Power Systems Features

  January 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is amazing to me that IBM stops selling specific Power Systems and features in such a gradual and what looks like a haphazard fashion. It seems to take forever to kill off older product lines. It may be more a function of what supplies Big Blue has in the barn than with some kind of orderly, sensible withdrawal from marketing of prior generations of gear.

  The upshot is that it is very hard to figure out what IBM is and is not selling, and when it will stop selling particular features. And because IBM does not usually provide the …

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• Investment And Integration Indicators For IBM i

  January 22, 2018 Dan Burger

  Steve Will can talk a blue streak. IBM, sometimes referred to as Big Blue, pays Will to do that. As chief architect of the IBM i operating system, he has a lot of other responsibilities, too. One of them is to listen. He travels around the world talking with and listening to IBM i customers.

  Last week, Will stopped by Southern California to attend the OCEAN user group meeting in Orange County. In his keynote session, he talked about IBM i strategy (that’s a bigger part of his job than listening), investments, and commitment to the future of the platform. …

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