• Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

  But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …

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• Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

  March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

  If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.

  After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …

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• IBM Patches New Security Vulns In IBM i Components, Power Firmware

  February 12, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched a series of moderate security vulnerabilities in IBM i products and Power firmware over the past two weeks. The IBM i flaws span Rational Developer for i (RDi), Access Client Solutions (ACS), and the Java development kit and runtime, while the Power flaw involves PowerVM and its communications with the Hardware Management Console (HMC).

  Concerns over security hit an all-time high in the IBM i community according to the IBM i Marketplace 2024 study conducted by Fortra. The survey found that 79 percent of IBM i professionals considered security a top concern, a 10 percent increase …

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• Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

  October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

  If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

  Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …

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• Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services

  July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.

  The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM …

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• Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM

  May 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Earlier this week, we told you about a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when running on Power9 and Power10 systems. IBM found the vulnerability itself and immediately set about to patch the vulnerability, which it revealed on May 17 along with patches to firmware in systems that are managed by the Hardware Management Console, or HMC.

  What was not necessarily apparent was that there are plenty of Power Systems customers who do not have HMCs managing their systems and the logical partitions upon them, and this is particularly true of the IBM i installed base, which …

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• IBM Publishes Power10 Performance Optimize Guide

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops looking to squeeze the most performance out of their Power10 servers have a lot of options available at their disposal. IBM covers many, if not all, of them in its latest performance paper, titled “IBM Power10 performance optimization for IBM i,” which it released last week.

  The Power10 is the most powerful processor IBM ever built. Compared to the Power9 processor, the Power10 delivers 20 percent to 30 percent higher performance per core. And with 25 percent more cores per socket, that means oodles of more processing power to do useful work.

  At a system level, the …

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• A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

  First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

  When …

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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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• PowerVM, vHMC, HMC, And Cloud Management Console Get Their Tweaks

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever the system hardware is updated, the virtualization and control plane software for that system also has to be tweaked, and we are finally getting around to covering some of improvements and changes that Big Blue has put into the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the HMC and vHMC management consoles, and the Cloud Management Console that were part of the July 12 Power10 entry and midrange system announcements.

  In announcement letter 222-191, we get the hardware tweaks to the stacks mentioned above, and in announcement letter 122-053. There are not earth-shattering updates, mind you. (Why do we want …

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