• Four Hundred Monitor, January 22

  January 22, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  I hope you’re not sick of cloud news yet, because we’re only a few weeks into the New Year and the cloud continues to dominate the headlines. Of course, it’s no surprise there are cloudy skies ahead for the IBM i ecosystems in 2020, but there is lots more to look forward to in the coming months. Our own Co-Editor of The Four Hundred Alex Woodie reached out to ask leaders around our community for their best predictions of what’s to come, and you can see what he found out in our top story below. Then don’t miss the results …

  Read more

• There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …

  Read more

• Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With age and wisdom comes a certain kind of calm expectation that does not necessarily put one in the frame of mind to make prognostications as much as making some observations, laying out priorities, and expressing desires. Making predictions is really about placing qualified and intelligent bets, more like hunting than the slower, measured pace of agriculture, which is about planning and fostering growth.

  As I approach the new decade, I am less in the mood to don my wizard hat with its moons and stars on it and to rub the dust off the crystal ball on my desk …

  Read more

• From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.

  But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …

  Read more

• Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s hard to believe, but when January rolls around, we will start publishing the 30th volume of The Four Hundred. This is a long time to do anything, and many editors have come and gone with this publication over the years – some down other career paths, others being stopped in their tracks on this path and leaving this world too early. We are honored to have worked with them all and to do the work of serving the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i community, and we carry on this work in their honor.

  This time …

  Read more

• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

  Read more

• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

  Read more

• Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help

  October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.

  These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …

  Read more

• You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …

  Read more

• Third Party Maintenance An Option As Power7 Goes EOL

  September 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Time is running out for IBM i shops with hardware support contracts for Power7 and Power7+ servers, which officially reach end of life (EOL) a week from today. For organizations that aren’t ready to migrate to newer Power8 or Power9 machines, there are third-party maintenance options that will let them keep running Power7 machines without abandoning the safety net.

  The September 30 EOL for Power7 hardware support not come as a surprise, as IBM has been talking about the event for two years. Big Blue has given its Power Systems customers plenty of time to upgrade from older systems, …

  Read more

Previous Articles