Linux on Power Archives

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 …
Read more
IBM Looks To Grow New Power College Program From The Ground Up

May 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

The “DANGER” sign is flashing red when it comes to IBM i skills. There simply aren’t enough people with IBM i skills to fill the market need, and the situation seems to be getting worse year by year. The good news is that IBM is aware of the problem and has launched a new program that executives hope will lead to more students learning IBM i skills and getting good jobs in the industry.

The worker shortage is a nationwide problem and is impacting multiple industries. From waiters and truck drivers to teachers and programmers, there just aren’t enough workers …
Read more
AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …
Read more
Guru: Physical System Performance

November 15, 2021 Dawn May

Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …
Read more
Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride

January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.

It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …
Read more
Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …
Read more
Reassessing IBM i Value: Worthless Iron or Legacy Goldmine?

March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

In the minds of modern-day technologists, the IBM i server is relegated to the scrap bin of history, looked down upon as a vestigial organ of technology’s past with no place in the distributed future, where workloads run effortlessly on clouds and data flows seamlessly everywhere. That outlook gives the platform’s present value a low mark, but considering the recent influx of capital into IBM i ecosystem, one might want to reassess.

Trying to assess the value of something is not an easy thing to do. When looking at the worth of the entire IBM i ecosystem, or even just …
Read more
TRs for IBM i 7.3 and 7.2: Enhancements, No Big Surprises

October 4, 2017 Dan Burger

With each Technology Refresh, we are reminded that the pace of enhancements IBM brings to its IBM i operating system and related software products is significant and that certain areas are more significant than others. So, the IBM i community is either aligned with these upgrades and eager to put them to use or it’s not yet ready, willing or able to be technologically current. As usual, there are IBM i shops watching as the enhancements unfold and making decisions on whether the enhancements can deliver benefits to their business in terms of productivity and solving business challenges.

Steve Will, …
Read more
Open Source On IBM i: Let It Grow

May 15, 2017 Dan Burger

The evaluation of open source software is nowhere near conclusive when it comes to enterprise grade application development. Decisions remain in the exploratory phases. Roadmaps are incomplete. Most are without clear routes to a destination. Some are without destinations. However, it would be wrong to assume roads are not being built.

There is no way that the future of application development – on IBM i or anywhere else – can handle everything that is coming down the pike without open source. That’s not a mandate to jump on a band wagon. It’s an awareness wake-up call. The IBM i community …
Read more

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search