• Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

  December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

  Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …

  Read more

• New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

  November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

  IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …

  Read more

• Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.

  But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …

  Read more

• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

  Read more

• Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

  But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

  Read more

• Sibley Highlights Power10’s Security and AI Capabilities

  October 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the vice president and global offering management for Cognitive Systems at IBM, Steve Sibley often gets the honor of delivering the keynote address at the annual POWERUp conference. During his keynote at last week’s show, Sibley used the time to delve into the latest Power10 processor and its extensive list of new features, including some designed specifically to boost AI and security.

  “One of the real privileges I have as project manager for Power Systems to be able to take the key innovations our team is developing in Rochester and our different development labs around the world, and bring …

  Read more

• The Shape Of The IBM To Come

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is getting ready to spin off its managed services businesses, which represents about a third of its revenue stream and a big chunk of its employee base, into the separate company called Kyndryl and hopes to have this task done by the end of the year. Last week, IBM’s top brass had a virtual meeting with Wall Street to host its Investor Day, and IBM’s chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, and the rest of the team unveiled a new segment and financial reporting structure that will be put into effect once the Kyndryl spinout is done.

  At that …

  Read more

• Early Bird Special For Common Europe Congress Ends October 14

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Copenhagen, which is known as “the happiest city in the world,” has its coronavirus situation under control and will be hosting the Common Europe Congress user group meeting from October 31 through November 3. Unlike the COMMON POWERUp 2021 event, which was supposed to be hosted in person in Virginia Beach, Virginia, as well as online, but has now been switched to a totally virtual event.

  Denmark has had its borders open since September 9, and vaccination rates are high and cases are very low. The reason, in part, has to do with high trust in the Danish government and …

  Read more

• The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

  For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

  A lot more than you probably think, as it …

  Read more

• Transferring Low Code Benefits Into The IBM i

  September 22, 2021 Eugene King

  As with fashion, there are trends in the IT industry and history tends to repeat itself in several exciting ways.  Development languages come into fashion, run their course, and then become obsolete. Then, they may be revamped with the addition of new criteria and frameworks. IBM i development also follows these same trends.

  The low-code movement is not new but another iteration on traditional programming. Let’s do a brief history review.

  At first, computer programming involved specific machine code associated with a particular processor architecture.  Eventually, the language was slightly abstracted to facilitate second-generation assembler code, which was partially portable …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles