• Mainframe And IBM i Share App Dev Testing Tool

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The integration of disparate IT systems is on the priority list for many companies aggravated by the duplication of effort and the cost tooling for each development environment. It’s fueled the rise of DevOps and the big picture view emphasizing speed and collaboration. For IT environments that share mainframe and IBM i platforms, we have uncovered software that allows applications written in COBOL, PL/I, EGL, RPG and Assembler to share a single tool for testing programs.

  The tool is called XaTester and it’s available through IBM and the company, Xact Consulting, that created it. Xact Consulting is an international …

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• IBM Expands Flash Drives For Power8 Iron

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, IBM announced a new lineup of small form factor disk drives with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors as well as updates for 2.5-inch flash drives that were a little bit on the beefy size. We suspect that these drives were intended to be co-launched with Power9-based servers, as well as some new, skinnier flash drives that were announced just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

  On November 21, in announcement letter 117-108, Big Blue rolled out the new 2.5-inch flash drives that are based on 3D NAND flash memory and are rated at …

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• More On That Power8 Core Activation Deal

  November 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In days gone by, which unfortunately I remember very well, it was not that difficult for any of us to find out what the pricing on every single piece of hardware and software was that comprised an IBM system. The difficulty with IBM’s very sophisticated pricing databases was reckoning how the many pieces fit together to build a system.

  Pricing information for Power Systems iron is a bit harder to come by these days, and as far as I know the pricing databases that I had access to for more than two decades were re-routed to configurators that could only …

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• Coming Attractions: The IBM i App Dev Multi-Platform Show

  November 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  Multi-platform development is more vision than reality. Application development is still a siloed environment as programming work remains more isolated and less collaborative than visionary thinkers wish it to be. Therefore, the existence of multiple programming environments within an organization seldom reaches the goal of operating as a team. Much of the potential benefit of teamwork lingers out of reach. Instead of a single team with common operations, there are individual teams with individual operations.

  The good news is that it’s better than it used to be. Still, the fabric of multi-platform unity and the efficiencies it would bring to …

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• IBM Deal Prices Current Power8 Compute Like Future Power9

  November 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The old proverb, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” is thankfully and just a little bit humorously applicable. In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, there was a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the fact that IBM is not shipping shiny new Power9 machines here in the fourth quarter and will not until early 2018. Given that fact and that the Power8’s are very long in the tooth, we fully expect for Big Blue to cut IBM i customers some kind of deal. There is a small deal for those buying Linux-only versions of the …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?

  October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

  “A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …

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• Big Blue Profits, Poised For The Power9

  October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Let’s just cut straight to the good news. Even though IBM’s revenues have declined for the 22nd quarter in a row, and its profits are declining even faster, the substantial investments that Big Blue has made in its System z14 mainframes and Power9 systems is about to start paying off.

  The System z14 mainframes made their debut in July and start shipping in the middle of September, converting from a drain on the company to a fairly large flow of cash. Power9 chip development ceased a while ago, and we presume most of the system engineering is done, and even …

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• Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

  October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.

  The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …

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• Crazy Idea # 542: Port IBM i To The Mainframe

  September 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you didn’t know it, and why would you care, IBM launched the new System z14 mainframe back in June, was talking about the new z14 motors it uses in August, and has just last week launched the LinuxOne “Emperor II” Linux-only mainframe variant of that platform. The machine, as always, has some impressive engineering. And it got me to thinking. Which is always dangerous.

  Here is a crazy idea. No, this is really crazy, unlike some of my other inspirations, which of course make perfect sense. Maybe IBM should converge the Power Systems and System z lines, and …

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• Sundry Withdrawals For Power7 And Power7+ Gear

  August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The sunrise of the Power9 systems is moving in slow motion and we no longer expect to see shiny new iron using this state of the art processor running either IBM i or AIX until sometime early in 2018. It is looking like maybe March or April at the moment. But the sunsetting of vintage Power Systems iron that will be displaced by the arrival of the Power9 machines is proceeding.

  Trying to figure out what is being ripped out of the IBM catalog, and when it will be removed from the sales channel, is more difficult than trying to …

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