• Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is pleasing, indeed, whenever you think of something that would be useful for a particular platform and then you find out that the company is working on it. This is indeed what I thought of when we reviewed the IBM i – A Strategic Preview For 2025 And Beyond session hosted by IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will at the recent POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California. I was not able to attend the event, but my co-editor, Alex Woodie, was able to, and hence we were quite pleased to see that Big Blue is apparently working on …

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• Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?

  June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM currently competes with a slew of independent IBM i clouds with its Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) offering. But as IBM’s PowerVS grows bigger and more capable, there is still a question: Can the independent IBM i clouds survive?

  Clouds have been around in one form or another for as long as the IBM midrange server has existed. Whether it’s termed co-location, a computer bureau, an application service provider (ASP), a managed service provider (MSP), or the cloud, people have been running IBM gear on behalf of other people for a very, very long time.

  Since the online bookseller Amazon …

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• 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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