• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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• IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage

  March 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If flash storage is ever going to replace disk storage, and there are good reasons to believe that at some point it will, this will happen because flash becomes normal and offers a mix of technical and economic reasons why it is worth a small premium – not a huge one, mind you – compared to buy dirt cheap spinning rust.

  IBM’s new FlashSystem C200, which debuted last week in announcement letter AD25-0017, might be just the thing that small and medium Power Systems customers have been waiting for.

  It has been a dozen years since IBM bought flash …

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• MDNA Speeds Up Git Transactions In Big IBM i Environments

  February 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With the latest release of its change management software for IBM i, Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) has addressed a thorny issue impacting the use of Git in large IBM i environments. The company also enhanced how it handles custom IBM i definitions in Git environments.

  The use of Git to manage source code has nearly doubled in the IBM i community over the past five years, according to Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Study, growing to 30 percent in the most recent survey. That indicates a strong push to adopt DevOps technologies and techniques, which is a good thing …

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• ARCAD Discover: Global Application Analysis With An AI Interface

  February 10, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Here is a simple test to reckon the value of the applications that run your company. Walk down to the datacenter, or over to the datacloset, or SSH out to the cloud, and turn the physical or logical machine running those applications off. What happens next?

  Aside from a lot of animated conversations and possibly some cursing, not much until you turn the machine back on and the system, databases, and applications reboot. You already knew this, but now everyone else has discovered, rather suddenly, how the very existence of the business and the livelihoods of the employees is dependent …

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• IBM Power On Track To Get Above $2 Billion A Year

  February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s stock price is kissing $260 a share, and this is a level that, adjusted for stock splits, the company has not seen since before it ran up on the rocks in the early 1990s as its mainframe business and AS/400 business all shrank at the same time that RISC/Unix systems and X86 gear in the datacenter took off. What’s going on?

  Well, here is the deal: IBM has customers using its Power and z servers for mission-critical back office systems, and a lot of the customers using its IBM i, AIX, Linux, and z/OS platforms are going to be …

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• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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• 2024: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to believe that yet another year is coming to a close. As 2024 rolls to its merciful end, it’s time for us to take stock of the major events and announcements that impacted the IBM i community.

  January

  News broke in late January that revenue in IBM’s Power Systems business grew for the second year in a row in 2023. TPM’s model showed $1.53 billion in external Power Systems sales for the year, which was a hair above the 2022 figure, which was a hair above the 2021 figure. It’s not 2010-era numbers, when the figure was north …

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• Power10 Keeps Plugging Along As Power11 Looms For 2025

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to a slowdown in sales ahead of next year’s Power11 and “Telum-II” System z17 launches.

  Business seems to be going pretty well for Big Blue, all things considered, although it had to pump $2.73 billion into its pension …

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• IBM Nears The End of the Road for Server Reliability Improvements

  October 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Reliability has always been one of the hallmarks of IBM big iron, the midrange and mainframe systems hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses on around the world. These sturdy systems simply don’t go down very often, certainly less frequently than “industry-standard” (i.e. Intel-based) systems. In fact, the System z and Power systems are so reliable that, statistically speaking, there’s very little room for improvement.

  For data on uptime and reliability, we turn to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), which is led by longtime IT industry analyst Laura DiDio. ITIC has been conducting an annual server and operating system …

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• IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.

  At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)

  Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …

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