• The IT Balancing Act

  May 1, 2023 Bill Langston

  Medical research suggests that how well you can maintain your balance is a powerful predictor of your longevity. Balance is also a good indicator of longevity for your IBM i environment. The challenge is striking the right balance between “vertical” technology that helps your company work efficiently and accurately, and “horizontal” technology that reduces risk.

  Over the past few years, unprecedented forces shifted IT priorities and may have knocked your company’s IBM i environment off balance.

  Enabling IT Balance

  IBM i exists because of how well it runs complex business applications and manages data. We take for granted that the …

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• IBM Looks To Grow New Power College Program From The Ground Up

  May 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The “DANGER” sign is flashing red when it comes to IBM i skills. There simply aren’t enough people with IBM i skills to fill the market need, and the situation seems to be getting worse year by year. The good news is that IBM is aware of the problem and has launched a new program that executives hope will lead to more students learning IBM i skills and getting good jobs in the industry.

  The worker shortage is a nationwide problem and is impacting multiple industries. From waiters and truck drivers to teachers and programmers, there just aren’t enough workers …

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• IBM i at 35: A Walk Down Memory Lane

  April 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You may have heard that the IBM midrange platform is turning 35 this year. IBM has a number of events planned in honor of that milestone, culminating with a big birthday bash on June 21. IBM execs gave us a sneak peak of the festivities to come at this week’s POWERUp show in Denver, as well as a technical look back at exactly how we got here.

  The day the AS/400 launched in 1988 was notable for several reasons. IBM i CTO Steve Will, who was just starting his distinguished engineering career at IBM, recalls lots of excitement in the …

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• Storage Helps Power Systems Grow In The First Quarter

  April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a peculiar thing: It is almost like there are two different Power Systems customer sets. Those that spend big in the second quarter and fourth quarter of every year and those that spend less big in the first and third quarters of every year.

  While we understand the normal Q4 bump that happens because there are decades of traditions, founded on good budgetary and capacity planning practices, we are a bit perplexed why when it comes to the Power Systems market at least, Q2 is almost as good revenue-wise as the prior Q4. We admit fully that this …

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• Using The Public Cloud For IBM i Disaster Recovery

  April 24, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Disasters can strike at any time, and it’s essential for organizations to have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. However, creating and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, particularly for organizations that rely on IBM i servers, often running business critical applications that perform key functions together with many interfaces into other servers and applications.

  Previously, investments in IBM i disaster recovery solutions were an expensive outlay, requiring significant capital investment in both hardware and software, in addition to the sizable costs associated with running a datacenter.

  Fortunately, with the advent …

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• Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance

  April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.

  PerfScan is the first product – and …

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• Tweaks To The Power Software Stack, And Red Hat Gets Easier

  April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system, its database, and the related systems and development tools for IBM i, you can bet Elon Musk’s last dollar that there will also be nips and tucks, and sometimes more significant changes, to the adjunct software that runs on Power Systems iron. Such as the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the PowerSC security tools, and other things.

  And indeed, as part of the April 11 announcements, IBM has tweaked this Power Systems stuff. This is not one of the big ones, as …

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• Performance Management: A Personal History, And Turning A New Page

  April 10, 2023 Doug Mewmaw

  The term “performance management” is broad, comprehensive, and uniquely personal depending upon the system, situation, and experience of the user defining it. I stumbled into the world of performance management early into my career, without even knowing it. As I reflect back on my career, it is also natural to reflect upon the history of performance management.

  I thought this reflection might be interesting to not only the old pros out there but also the new guys just coming into the industry. I have been fortunate to be on an interesting journey, and one that is about to change not …

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• IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

  As we have pointed out …

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• When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

  March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

  A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

  To be a managed …

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