• Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.

  The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …

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• Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have a feeling that Big Blue let the cat out of the bag a little early on a price increase for its Power Expert Care technical support services for the Power10 platform. We have this feeling because IBM on May 1 canceled a price increase in the Americas region in announcement letter AD25-1009 and in the Japan region in announcement letter AD25-1048.

  This is weird, and we are showing you the Americas announcement below in case IBM takes it down:

  

  First of all, the letter number referenced for May 1 does not match the actual letter number, which …

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• Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

  April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.

  There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …

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• Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

  April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

  First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …

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• z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems

  April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.

  This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …

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• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

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• What’s New With IBM PowerVS In 2025?

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It has been six years since IBM launched IBM Power Virtual Server, its public cloud offering for IBM i workloads. Adoption started slowly but has picked up in recent years as IBM fleshed out the offering and expanded it to more datacenters. As we enter the second quarter, IBM is banking on several new features to help it attract more IBM i customers to PowerVS.

  Last October, IBM offered PowerVS in 21 IBM Cloud datacenters around the world, including 650 Power Systems customers. Doris Conti, the vice president of Power Systems product management, told The Four Hundred that IBM had …

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• More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems

  March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.

  These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …

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• Fresche Makes Moves In The Cloud

  March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions is well known for IBM i application modernization, a line of business in which it has been successful for many decades. Thanks to its acquisition of OmniData Insights and a new partnership with IBM, the company is launching new ventures in the cloud.

  In early March, Fresche Solutions announced a partnership with IBM that will see Fresche managing IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) customers. PowerVS is IBM’s cloud offering, and gives customers the capability to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux operating systems either in IBM datacenters or its partners’ datacenters. The deal with IBM means that Fresche …

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• Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

  Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …

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