• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to impossible or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

  (That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …

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• IBM i Headed To Azure By Way Of Skytap

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run their IBM i workloads on the Azure cloud will soon be able to, thanks to a new partnership that Skytap and Microsoft unveiled today. As part of the new offering, Microsoft will install Power9 servers in an Azure data center and Skytap will manage the IBM i, AIX, and Linux environments on behalf of clients.

  Skytap turned heads in the IBM i community earlier this year with the introduction of a public cloud service that’s unlike anything that came before it. The Seattle, Washington, company unveiled an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering …

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• What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

  August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

  This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …

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• The AS/400 Operations Evolution

  August 26, 2019 Tom Huntington

  (Sponsored Content) According to a 2018 ITIC survey, 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the number one cause of unplanned downtime. In that story, the president of an IT operations and cybersecurity company observed that “the root causes of downtime are the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But there are more of them.”

  That got us thinking. Businesses and technologies have changed over the past few decades, but why haven’t our IT processes kept pace? Why are we still suffering from downtime as the result of human error? Sure, human …

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• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• Setting The Stage For The Next Decade Of Processing

  August 12, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is no secret that Moore’s Law is causing all kinds of grief with chip designers working in all parts of the IT stack. It was bad enough to run out of clock scaling when Dennard Scaling stopped, and the industry has done a great job in making processors more parallel and allowing for them to offload processing to various kinds of accelerators, either on the die, in the package, or in the chassis over high speed interconnects. But even this is running out of gas as processors keep pushing up against the reticle limits of lithography machines because the …

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• Midrange Dynamics Speeds Table Updates In Db2 Mirror Clusters

  August 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  With the launch of Db2 Mirror with IBM i 7.4 in June, IBM heralded the age of continuous availability on the midrange platform, bringing IBM i up to par with Windows and Linux platforms. However, while the new software keeps production data in perfect synch, it’s not so great at keeping up with changes to underlying database tables. That’s an area that Midrange Dynamics is addressing with its change management software.

  With Db2 Mirror, IBM has essentially extended a single-server database implementation into a clustered database with two active nodes. As soon as a piece of data is created, updated, …

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• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …

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• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

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