• Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.

  In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …

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• Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates

  October 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.

  In announcement letter 222-279, we find the usual agglomeration of updates to the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the virtual Hardware Management Console, and the Cloud Management Console.

  With PowerVM, IBM wanted to …

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• Smart Modernization Is The Answer To IBM i Talent Shortage

  September 28, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  When we are at the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference a few months ago, we were amazed by the number of IT managers that approached us because of a shortage of IBM i programming talent. The dearth of programmers that are experienced with the business as well as legacy and modern programming techniques has pushed a lot of businesses up against the wall, with lost agility and in some cases delayed projects.

  As bad as that is, the situation could be worse. We have all heard the horror stories, where the executive suite or upper IT management push to switch away …

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• What CMOD Functions You Can Access Via New Nav

  September 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM made a lot of news in May with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3. One of the items that you may have missed in the avalanche of news was the unveiling of a new interface in IBM Navigator for i (a.k.a., New Navigator) that gives access to Content Manager OnDemand for i (CMOD) functionality.

  CMOD, as you probably know, is a licensed application from IBM that has been around for decades, which means there has to be a good number of customers using it for essential business functions. While paper …

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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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• Withdrawal Symptoms: A Bunch Of IBM Services Tweaks, Storage Deleted

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every product comes to the end of its life cycle, whether it is hardware or software or even services because it is troublesome to repair or troubleshoot the old stuff as it wears out (in the case of hardware) or suffers from bit rot (in the case of software) or brain drain (in the case of services). And so it is with a bunch of different things that affect some big Power Systems shops.

  With a bunch of new Technical Account Manager (TAM) and ServicePac services offerings for the Power Systems line, which we wrote about back in August, …

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• A Smorgasbord Of Power Systems Stuff

  September 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is usually pretty quiet on the IT front in the wake of the American Labor Day holiday, especially with a lot of European countries also having bank holidays around that time and many schools just starting back up again. Here in 2022, it is no different, although IBM did uncharacteristically launch the full subscription entry Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers on September 6.

  In any event, in the weeks surrounding the holiday, Big Blue did a bunch of stuff relating to the Power Systems platform and we want to tell you about it so you stay …

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• The Security Awareness Of People Is The Important Firewall In IT

  September 19, 2022 John Fehr

  Your company can have the best firewalls, the best intrusion detection and protection systems, and the best sensors and filters all wrapped around the IT organization. Your company can have the IBM i platform, legendary for its rock-solid security, locked down with the tightest security, and everyone can change their strong passwords frequently. Your company can have administrators using tools to monitor exit points and the Integrated File System that can be a breeding ground for viruses. Your company can have firewalls and antivirus software installed on every desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone that comes in contact with your infrastructure. …

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• Pandora FMS Log Monitoring Solution Gets IBM i Hooks

  September 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Pandora FMS, an open source log monitoring solution that has been in use for decades, is being integrated with IBM i, the software’s commercial backer announced last week. Thanks to a partnership between Pandora FMS and the French company M81, organizations that use the software can add IBM i into the monitoring mix.

  Pandora FMS, short for Flexible Monitoring System, is an open source tool for consuming and analyzing server and network logs. The utility, which was written in PHP and runs on Linux, uses agents (developed in Perl) to keep an eye on servers running Linux, Windows, and Unix …

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• IBM’s Competitive Analysis For Power10 Entry Machines

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Long gone are the days when IBM, and indeed most other server vendors, clamored to run TPC-C, SAP SD, and SPEC JVM transaction processing benchmark tests on their new machines to prove they had the performance and they had the bang for the buck to compete in the broader market.

  To be fair, many of those tests had their flaws, allowing a certain amount of gaming of the benchmarks (as happened with the TPC-C and SPEC JVM tests) or not having official pricing attached to them (as happened with the SPEC JVM and SAP SD tests). Still, those benchmarks, as …

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