• Historical, Functional, And Relevant

  July 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The purpose of The Four Hundred, which entered its 33^rd year of publication this week, is to support the community of companies and their IT staffs – and ultimately the end users and the success of those companies – who have deployed their mission critical applications on System/38, System/36, AS/400, AS/400e, iSeries, System i, and now IBM i platforms for a decade longer than we have been around. My mentor, Hesh Wiener, and various colleagues who worked for other publications that covered the System/38 and System/36 from the time before I came onto the scene in July 1989, …

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• Testing: The Secret Weapon Of DR Success

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Just as every company should carry liability insurance, every company should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Without a plan, the odds of recovering from a disaster are meager, at best. But just having a plan isn’t good enough, either — the company must test the plan to gauge whether it will actually work.

  Whether your software runs in a server housed at your headquarters or in a giant rack in a public cloud across the state, it’s a critical element for smooth operations. While this information technology is usually reliable — and if you’re running IBM i, it’s almost …

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• The Smearing Of Infrastructure And Platform Clouds

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The largest public clouds on the planet are also among the most secretive and influential companies in the IT sector, and therefore despite events that go one for days or, now in the time of coronavirus, for weeks on end, we get very little actual information out of them about specifically what is going on in the cloud market with any amount of specificity.

  Yes, everybody and anybody who is an incumbent in the IT sector talks about how their “cloud” business is doing, and at least one of the big IT market researchers is sort of throwing up its …

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• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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• If You Can’t Get To The Tape, It Doesn’t Matter If It Is Dead Or Not

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic has made most IT shops seriously re-evaluate a number of the technologies they have to maintain, operate, backup, and protect their mission-critical applications and their data. And the companies that have IBM i systems as their main platforms are no more insulated from these issues than those who picked other platforms – although it is safe to say that they have very good tools to help with all of the above, and in many cases, these tools are arguably better than – or identical to – what is available for Windows Server, Linux, or other platforms.

  Over …

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• Syncsort’s Pitney Bowes Deal: All About Good, Clean Data

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort completed its $700 million acquisition of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business last week, just in time to get a piece of the end-of-year IT spending extravaganza. As Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers sees it, the deal will bring a host of benefits to existing Syncsort customers, particularly as it relates to feeding next-gen analytics systems with good, clean data.

  The Pitney Bowes deal brings Syncsort new solutions that it can sell to business intelligence and data analytics organizations, including data quality, data cleansing, data matching, and data discovery tools. It also brings master data management (MDM) capabilities to Syncsort, …

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• Join Us For The IBM i On The Public Cloud Webinar

  December 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of waiting, it looks like IBM i shops are going to have a wide variety of options when it comes to acquiring true cloud computing to either replace or augment their on premises systems.

  IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Skytap all are offing slices of Power9 machines, which complement the cloudy and hosted infrastructure that has been available for a number of years from Connectria, iInTheCloud, UCG Technologies, LightEdge Solutions, Data Storage Corp, Source Data Products, Secure Information and Services, and First Option IT have offerings that fall on the spectrum from traditional hosting to cloud as …

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• IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

  We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

  In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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• IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

  IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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