• IBM i on Google Cloud Appears To Be Stuck in Alpha

  February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Companies that want to run IBM i workloads in Google Cloud will have to wait a bit longer, as the public cloud service is still in limited alpha, with no signs that it will become generally available any time soon.

  It has been close to three years since we first broke the news about the partnership between IBM and Google Cloud. At the inaugural POWERUp conference in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2018, IBM i chief architect Steve Will publicly discussed plans the two companies had made to run IBM i and AIX instances on the Power Systems servers …

  Read more

• Connectria Bringing IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that want greater integration between their IBM i and cloud systems may be interested in a new offering unveiled yesterday by Connectria. In January, the private cloud company is planning to launch a new hybrid cloud offering that delivers a low latency connection between its hosted IBM i environments and AWS data centers located on the East and West coasts.

  Connectria says its new hybrid cloud offering provides an “ultra-low latency direct connection” between its IBM i and AIX resources and Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions. With just 2 milliseconds of latency between Connectria’s Power Systems …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

  July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

  While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …

  Read more

• Google Launches Power Systems Cloud, But Not Yet for IBM i

  January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Google last week officially unveiled IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud, a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that will allow customers to run AIX, Linux, and IBM i workloads and manage it from their familiar Google Cloud accounts. Google says that AIX and Linux are ready to go, but says that IBM i customers will have to wait just a little longer to get in on the cloud action.

  The general availability of IBM Power Systems on Google Cloud has been years in the making. Google was one of the earliest enrollees in IBM’s Open Power initiative, and …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• Five Skills You Don’t Need To Manage IBM i (And Two You Do)

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  Much has been said to debunk the myth of an IBM i skills shortage or decry it as a disappearing act. Yet, year after year, respondents to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey by HelpSystems list IBM i skills as a top concern. The results also show that organizations are addressing these concerns by adding automation, modernizing development, and getting rid of obsolete technology that breeds the dreaded word: legacy.

  But why do we on IBM i continue to carry the perception that so-called “IBM i skills” are scarce? Is it because the keywords in our job listings don’t …

  Read more

Previous Articles