• Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron

  October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.

  Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 37

  September 23, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  This week, there are recommended fixes for the cryptographic services in the IBM i platform and Big Blue’s own cryptographic co-processors, which run encryption, decryption, and hashing algorithms on outboard compute engines rather than on the Power CPUs at the heart of the system. You can read about the recommended fixes for IBM i 7.2 here and for IBM i 7.3 there. As far as we know, there are not fixes for IBM i 7.4 or IBM i 7.5.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs

  …

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• How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.

  But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …

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• IBM Kills Off Fax/400, But Alternatives Are Available

  August 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM will cease supporting Facsimile Support for i, commonly known as Fax/400, with the next release of the IBM i operating system, it announced last month. That tees up an opportunity for third-party vendors like Fresche Solutions and others to fill the void for a communication technology that is still used by businesses.

  The IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX) product was not among the group of 16 IBM i products that IBM initially withdrew from sales and support with its discontinuance of support letter back on May 7, the same day that it announced the latest technology refreshes (TRs) …

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• Fans Revving Like Crazy On Your Power10? Check The Firmware

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a patch to firmware for Power Systems is defective, and when it does happen, we like to point it out.

  Defective PTFs happen fairly regularly with IBM i, as defective patches happen for other operating systems. Sometimes the effects of defective PTF patches are dramatic, sometimes they are just weird. Sometimes they are in between.

  Both IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 have a defective patch in the firmware for Power10 systems, and to be super precise it affects machine types 9105-22A (Power S1022), 9105-22B (Power S1022s), 9105-41B (Power S1014), 9105-42A (Power …

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• Big Blue Offers Managed Services For PowerVS Private Cloud Pods

  May 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are lots of ways to skin the cloud infrastructure cat. You can rent cloudy capacity and manage it yourself. That is called Power Virtual Server. You can buy your own virtualized Power Systems servers and manage them with the same control plane as is used for the PowerVS cloud. That is called Power Virtual Server Private Cloud, of PowerVS Private Cloud for short. (Sort of.)

  And now, with announcement letter AD24-0420, Big Blue is offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it from the company’s own …

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• What Do Secondhand Power9 Machines Cost These Days?

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before IBM consolidated its Global Asset Recovery Services arm in the Systems group in the wake of the spinout of the Kyndryl outsourcing and services business, we could go out to the IBM web site every now and then and get a sense of what secondhand Power Systems machinery cost. But alas, that is no longer the case.

  And so, we went poking around the Internet late on a Friday night and stumbled across our old friends at Data Tech Computer Services in Alpharetta, Georgia, which have been in business nearly three decades peddling AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM …

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• StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.

  StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software …

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• PUB400: Your Free IBM i Playground

  March 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Search the Web for “free Linux server” and hundreds of results pop up. Do the same for “free IBM i server” and your results are much more limited. But what the universe of free IBM i servers lacks in quantity it makes up in quality thanks in large part to PUB400, a free IBM i instance that has been serving the midrange community for nearly a quarter century.

  Many IT Jungle readers undoubtedly are familiar with PUB400.com, which was started by Holger Scherer on a little AS/400 Model 150 back in 1999. Over the years, the site and the …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems

  February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.

  In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.

  So it is with the decade long …

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