• Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.

  2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …

  Read more

• Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.

  The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …

  Read more

• IBM Extends Dynamic Capacity Pricing Scheme To Its Cloud

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What if you could buy computer processing credits from a systems vendor and use the credits to run workloads on your on-premise server or in the vendor’s cloud? Better yet, what if the vendor was IBM and the workloads were IBM i applications? Because that is essentially the hybrid computing pricing structure that IBM unveiled yesterday as part of its latest Power Systems announcements.

  The new hybrid pricing option is an extension of the so-called Dynamic Capacity pricing scheme that IBM unveiled through its Power Private Cloud offering, which IBM launched in May 2020. As part of that offering, …

  Read more

• IBM i on Google Cloud Appears To Be Stuck in Alpha

  February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Companies that want to run IBM i workloads in Google Cloud will have to wait a bit longer, as the public cloud service is still in limited alpha, with no signs that it will become generally available any time soon.

  It has been close to three years since we first broke the news about the partnership between IBM and Google Cloud. At the inaugural POWERUp conference in San Antonio, Texas, in May 2018, IBM i chief architect Steve Will publicly discussed plans the two companies had made to run IBM i and AIX instances on the Power Systems servers …

  Read more

• Power Systems Security: More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

  February 17, 2021 Tony Perera

  The IBM i platform is no longer an island unto itself. In many companies, there is a diversity of different systems — Unix systems, Linux servers, and Windows environments, not to mention IBM i. Each of these environments brings its own strength and weakness. The goal is to not let these differences hurt something that’s important to you: security.

  Make no mistake: It’s a good thing that Power Systems servers can run multiple operating systems. From an IBM i perspective, it ensures more R&D dollars from IBM to support the hardware. It seems doubtful IBM would spend billions to develop …

  Read more

• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

  Read more

• Weighing The Hidden Costs Of Open Source

  February 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  One of the perceived benefits of using open source software is cost. It’s often free to obtain, and users can get technical support au gratis through community supported websites. But what is often missing from that equation are hidden costs associated with running that software in production environments. An IDC report commissioned from IBM seeks to put a number to those costs.

  In production environments, where the risk of a business interruption due to IT issues is high, companies must make the conscious decision to dedicate some of its staff’s time to supporting a given piece of open source software, …

  Read more

• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

  Read more

• IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.

  As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …

  Read more

• Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.

  It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles