• No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.

  One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …

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• Comarch’s PowerCloud Gives IBM, Microsoft, And Google A Run For The Money

  July 14, 2021 Tomasz Wachnicki

  If you are looking for a cloud provider that has expertise in Power-based systems and that has datacenters in the United States, Europe, and Asia – so they are local to those geographies – and yet available on a truly global basis, and backed by deep experience in managed services for IBM i and AIX platforms, you have an option that you might not be aware of. The company is called Comarch, and it is taking on IBM, Google, and Microsoft/Skytap for IBM i and AIX business in the cloud.

  For those of you who are unaware of Comarch, it …

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• Ransomware Attacks Hit Closer To Home

  July 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Fifteen hundred organizations around the world had their data locked up in the latest ransomware attack, including grocery store chains and schools. It’s unclear if any IBM i shops were included in the attack, which a Russian hacking group claimed credit for. But it’s clear that ransomware is a growing threat to all organizations, including IBM i shops.

  On July 2, as hundreds of millions of Americans hunkered down for the long Independence Day holiday weekend, hackers using the REvil were just getting started. The Russian-affiliated hacking group had already done the hard work of exploiting a five-year-old security flaw …

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• Illumio Adds IBM i Support with Zero-Trust Security

  June 30, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Illumio this week announced that it now supports IBM i with its zero-trust security framework, which is designed to isolate data and applications with “microperimeters” that prevent the spread of malware and hackers once they have breached the corporate firewalls.

  The zero-trust security model is gaining steam as organizations attempt to stop hackers from infiltrating their networks and pilfering valuable data or encrypting data as part of a ransomware attack.

  Previously, security experts recommended that the best way to keep bad guys out of internal networks was to implement multiple overlapping levels of security. This approach incorporated network security devices …

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• New Converged Archive System, Power Gear Withdrawals

  June 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has all of the pieces to make an appliance for archiving all kinds of data, and so the company has done just that with the Converged Archive Solution announced last week.

  This box doesn’t run IBM i, but in keeping with the theme “anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer” we are telling you about it. Also, just like many IBM i shops have deployed storage area networks (SANs) to create a unified, shared storage array for their IBM i, AIX, z/OS, Windows Server, and Linux machines to share for block storage and centralized …

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• IBM i Business Bucks The COVID Trend, Will Says

  June 21, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The COVID pandemic has slammed American business and the American economy in many different ways, and it has taken its toll on server sales. But according to Steve Will, the IBM i chief architect, sales of IBM i systems have grown over the past three quarters. In response, IBM has enabled Rochester to go on a bit of a hiring spree to bolster the IBM i development team.

  “The IBM i business in 2021 is actually quite strong,” Will said during his presentation at the NAViGATE conference that COMMON held the week of May 24. “We had a very down …

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• Get Virtually Packed For Common Europe Power Summer Camp

  June 7, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The world is still not in the swing of things when it comes to business travel, trade shows, and conferences, and in many ways that is a good thing because events that were not physically accessible to many of us are now virtually accessible. Provided that you can deal with some time zone changes from time to time.

  Such is the case with Common Europe’s Power Summer Camp 2021 Virtual Edition, which is running live on the Internet June 14, 15, and 17. No, that is not a typo, the event is skipping a day on June 16, perhaps to …

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• Ransomware Epidemic Hits Epic Proportions, And IBM i Shops Take Notice

  May 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The ransomware outbreak hit home for millions of Americans last week when attackers shut down a major East Coast pipeline as well as a hospital network on the West Coast. For IBM i shops, the events are a potent reminder to re-evaluate network security and data protection systems to ensure they’re resilient from attack.

  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of Mr. Robot last week as news spread of the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline network, which provides 45 percent of the gasoline for the entire East Coast of the United States through 5,500 miles of …

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• In Search of Multi-Modal Data Integration

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the number of data sources that companies use goes up, so too does the complexity of the data pipelines that bring it all together. Instead of using a mix of different tools and technologies for ETL, ELT, and batch integration, some users are seeking a single multi-modal data integration tool that can deliver multiple integration approaches.

  One company providing multi-modal data integration is Equalum. The company’s DataOps offering works in various methodologies, including capturing real-time database updates using change data capture (CDC) technology; batch-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) and ELT; and REST- and SOAP-based data integration using …

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• A Cornucopia Of Compute

  May 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ever since the advent of file servers in the 1980s, the rise of client/server system architectures in the early 1990s, and the commercialization of Internet networking in the middle 1990s, AS/400 shops and those using the progeny of that venerable IBM midrange computer have had hybrid computing platforms in the datacenter. Meaning, a mix of processor architectures and operating systems other than OS/400 or IBM i that was in some fashion associated with or actually doing mission critical work.

  In fact, as you all well know, there is in aggregate more raw compute in the X86 or RISC servers that …

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