• The Cacophony Of Many Different Server Markets

  September 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how skittery the global economy is, how wonky the world’s supply chains are, and how capricious spending by the big public clouds and the hyperscalers can be (and how much the top eight server buyers in the world make up of the overall market), the fact that the server market only had a 2.5 percent decline in the second quarter is not a surprise.

  It’s just the normal noise in the data, and perhaps, if IDC is right, a slight shift away from using two-socket servers with a modest number of cores to single-socket servers with a larger number …

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• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360

  July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.

  Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …

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• 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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• The Long Play

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Surprising things persist, and for good reasons. Around this time every year, when summer is officially beginning, I take a pause and think thankful thoughts about the AS/400 and its progeny, which trace back to the June 21, 1988, launch. I didn’t enter the market until a year later, as the cub reporter and one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, my first real job out of college and one I still gladly hold.

  We have all been through a lot of change in 33 years, to be sure. The IT market is so different today from …

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• Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time is running out if you want to hear about how you can move to modern DevOps technologies and merge them with your IBM i platform, bridging the gap between new and legacy. (We don’t use the word old around these parts.)

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting the how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch …

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• Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …

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• Modern Tools For A Modern IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops may be in for a rude awakening when they suddenly realize their applications are not keeping up with the times. How can these IBM i shops get on the right track in the modernization department? A trio of IBMers offered some tips.

  Brad Bentley, Tim Rowe, and Kris Whitney took to the virtual airwaves last week to present “IBM Tools for Modernizing Your IBM i Applications,” a one-hour webinar from IBM. Application modernization is an extremely broad topic, as the 266-page IBM Redbook of the (almost) same name will attest to, so they obviously didn’t cover …

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• Guardicore Extends Zero-Trust Security to IBM i

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Guardicore, which is trying to shake up the firewall market with its “micro segmentation” security solution, recently announced that it has extended its “zero-trust” approach to the IBM i platform. The offering will help IBM i shops close blind spots in their security posture by monitoring the server for signs of problems, the company says.

  Guardicore develops a software-based security solution called Centra that uses a micro segmentation approach to protecting IT assets from evolving security threats. Micro segmentation is a relatively new approach to cybersecurity that revolves around the concept of breaking the network down into multiple segments or …

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• A Cornucopia Of Compute

  May 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since the advent of file servers in the 1980s, the rise of client/server system architectures in the early 1990s, and the commercialization of Internet networking in the middle 1990s, AS/400 shops and those using the progeny of that venerable IBM midrange computer have had hybrid computing platforms in the datacenter. Meaning, a mix of processor architectures and operating systems other than OS/400 or IBM i that was in some fashion associated with or actually doing mission critical work.

  In fact, as you all well know, there is in aggregate more raw compute in the X86 or RISC servers that …

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