• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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• SAP Raises Costs, Slashes Innovation for On-Prem Software

  August 9, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Companies that run SAP on-prem, including all of its IBM i customers, will be left out in the cold following the German ERP giant’s latest moves, which includes a 5 percent increase in annual on-prem support costs and a pledge from the CEO that all new “innovation” only will be delivered in the cloud.

  SAP, like most enterprise software vendors, has been trying to get its customers to move to cloud versions of its ERP software for some time. Moving customers to cloud subscriptions not only smooths out the revenue stream for companies like SAP compared to the sporadic …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services

  July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.

  The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Remote Managed Services Fill In For Retiring And Overburdened IT Staff

  July 10, 2023 Raymond Hammell

  If you manage an IT department, you’ve likely received that dreaded 2am phone call, or you’ve had to hire someone to replace a retiring IBM i systems administrator. And, if you’re like most IBM i professionals, you probably wish you had more time to focus on strategic activities (or take a vacation!) instead of worrying about day-to-day systems maintenance.

  Managing IBM i environments requires a specific set of skills that can be hard to come by, leaving IT departments struggling to keep up with growing infrastructure, data volumes and business demands. Tedious maintenance and repetitive tasks add to the burden …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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• FNTS Launches Managed Services for Power Servers in IBM Cloud

  May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Have a Power server running in IBM Cloud but want someone else to provide the care and feeding? Then you might be interested in the new service unveiled by longtime IBM business partner FNTS to manage customers’ Power environments running in the IBM Cloud.

  FNTS is an Omaha, Nebraska, outfit that has been sailing the IBM i and mainframe seas for many years. The company, which previously went by the name First National Technology Solutions, was the IT branch of a former bank, First National of Nebraska Inc., that was spun out to providing hosting services more than 25 years …

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• The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin

  May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.

  The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …

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• Rimini Supports IBM i Environments with New Outsourcing Biz

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rimini Street’s new outsourcing business, Rimini ONE, supports IBM i application environments, the company confirmed to IT Jungle. In addition to delivering application support services for JD Edwards and SAP running on IBM i, the Las Vegas company is also offering to manage the full stack of technology upon which these ERP systems run.

  Rimini Street has provided third-party support and maintenance services for a variety of ERP systems for over a decade. You may have recalled the epic legal battle it waged with Oracle, which accused the company of stealing its intellectual property in pursuit of its …

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• OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops

  May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …

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