• Performance Management: A Personal History, And Turning A New Page

  April 10, 2023 Doug Mewmaw

  The term “performance management” is broad, comprehensive, and uniquely personal depending upon the system, situation, and experience of the user defining it. I stumbled into the world of performance management early into my career, without even knowing it. As I reflect back on my career, it is also natural to reflect upon the history of performance management.

  I thought this reflection might be interesting to not only the old pros out there but also the new guys just coming into the industry. I have been fortunate to be on an interesting journey, and one that is about to change not …

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• Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.

  And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …

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• IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

  As we have pointed out …

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• When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

  March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

  A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

  To be a managed …

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• You Ought To Be Committed

  March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a phrase that we learn as teenagers, concomitant with the kinds of peer pressure that close friends can bring to bear early in our lives to nudge us, that applies in an inverse way to a portion of the IBM i customer base, or probably more precisely, to the upper management at a portion of the company that thinks – erroneously – that getting off the IBM i platform is somehow going to magically fix their particular IT problems.

  All talk and no action.

  Don’t get us wrong. We are not trying to get people to move off …

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• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

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• Why Maxava High Availability?

  February 27, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Software-based logical replication for IBM i remains a popular solution for high availability and disaster recovery due to its ability to adapt over the years to changing environments like co-locations and the cloud. Maxava HA is known for its efficiency and scalability, but what else sets it apart for large enterprises worldwide?

  Negligible CPU Consumed On Production Server

  The Audit Journal (QAUDJRN) is a valuable tool for protecting the IBM i server with over 70 auditable events. However, in large environments, it can become overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of entries every minute. Some logical replication solutions heavily rely on …

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• A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.

  There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.

  Announcement letter 120-017 has …

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• Getting Ready for IBM i Cloud Migrations

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Interest in the cloud is growing at the moment as IBM i shops put all their run-time options on the table. However, customers who decide to move IBM i workloads to the cloud often don’t have a firm grasp on everything that goes into such a migration. There’s a lot of prep work that needs to be done, and too many shops are not ready when moving day arrives.

  Many IBM i shops are considering a move to the cloud, according to the 2023 IBM i Marketplace Study from Fortra (formerly HelpSystems). The report showed that cloud migrations moved from …

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• 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 …

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