i5/OS Archives - IT Jungle

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 …
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Relieving The Anxiety About IBM i Performance

September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Starting a business is an exciting thing, and one of the most fundamental activities any of us can engage in as members of a capitalist economy. My adage has always been: Those who can work, must; those who can employ, must as well. I have faced my share of those moments, starting a business, with excitement and trepidation and hope. And now, our good friend and colleague, Doug Mewmaw, has hung out his shingle, which says Peak System Performance on it.

Mewmaw, as you well know from reading The Four Hundred, is an expert on performance analysis and …
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Retranslation Could Boost Performance

May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.

One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …
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IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database

April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.

Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …
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The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …
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Overdue Upgrades Perplex IBM i Shops

January 31, 2018 Dan Burger

When decision makers describe their IT environments by saying the more we know, the less we understand, there’s a problem that needs to be solved. Maybe you have the brains on staff to figure out how to put heat-resistant handles on this steaming pot. Maybe not. But the problem isn’t going to solve itself and those who don’t search for an answer become part of the problem.

This specific problem bubbles to the surface when organizations fall behind on unsupported versions of the operating system and unsupported software. It’s risky business and a gamble that has little chance of paying …
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The IBM i Base Is Ready To Move On Up

January 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Even the most eager hyperscaler or cloud builder in the world has to let a server sit in place, running workloads, for at least three years to get good value on the dollar spent, and in many cases, machines are repurposed to be in the fleet for longer than that. And no company can accept the risk of changing all machines at the same time, for obvious reasons other than cost, because such a change could be very disruptive to any business. Enterprises tend to have less spare iron and fewer techies, and so they are even more conservative, and …
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The AS/400 Lessons Come Back Around With Power9 Systems

December 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For many years before I took the job as Systems Editor at The Register and in the years since I left that post, the joke about any new system or device was: “Yes, but can it run Crysis?” Those of us writing stories would bend a few sentences around the idea, particularly with Linux systems, which if you equipped them with the WINE Windows emulator might allow said device to indeed run that first-person shooter game that was popular from 2007 through 2013.

As we think about the new “Witherspoon” Power9 server that IBM launched last week, we can’t help …
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IBM i Slow to Catch On, But What Does It Mean?

October 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

It’s been nine-and-a-half years since IBM rebranded the name of the platform from System i to IBM i on Power Systems. However, many people in the IBM midrange community call the platform by something other than its official name, according to anecdotal evidence and Web search data. Is this evidence of continued name confusion, or is there something else at play?

IBM has been running from the iSeries name since its 2006 rebranding exercise, which replaced iSeries with System i. That name went by the wayside in April 2008, when IBM announced the Power Systems platform and the merger of …
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