• IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

  IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …

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• Power9 Prime Previews Future Power10 Memory Boost

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Customers who are deploying Linux on Power Systems iron from Big Blue are about to get a very substantial boost in memory bandwidth as IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9’ (that’s a prime symbol, not an apostrophe or a typo, after the 9) processor. As we previewed back in March 2018, the Power9’ chip will feature a substantially upgraded memory subsystem that has a new, faster SERDES signaling technology, normally used for various kinds of system and accelerator interconnect, that has been tweaked to support memory buffers and therefore DDR4 and future memories.

  There is no technical …

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• You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …

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• Relieving The Anxiety About IBM i Performance

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting a business is an exciting thing, and one of the most fundamental activities any of us can engage in as members of a capitalist economy. My adage has always been: Those who can work, must; those who can employ, must as well. I have faced my share of those moments, starting a business, with excitement and trepidation and hope. And now, our good friend and colleague, Doug Mewmaw, has hung out his shingle, which says Peak System Performance on it.

  Mewmaw, as you well know from reading The Four Hundred, is an expert on performance analysis and …

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• Google Has a Public Power Systems Cloud, Too

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We have been telling you about a prospective Power Systems offering on the Google Cloud for the better part of two years. Well, it looks like Google and IBM went ahead and launched the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering earlier this year, even if the companies neglected to publicly announce it.

  As part of its new “IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud” offering, Google has installed IBM Power Systems S922 servers in US-East 4, a Google Cloud data center in Northern Virginia, and is selling access to slices of IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems carved up by …

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• IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.

  The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to improbable or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

  (That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …

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• IBM i Headed To Azure By Way Of Skytap

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run their IBM i workloads on the Azure cloud will soon be able to, thanks to a new partnership that Skytap and Microsoft unveiled today. As part of the new offering, Microsoft will install Power9 servers in an Azure data center and Skytap will manage the IBM i, AIX, and Linux environments on behalf of clients.

  Skytap turned heads in the IBM i community earlier this year with the introduction of a public cloud service that’s unlike anything that came before it. The Seattle, Washington, company unveiled an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering …

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• What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

  August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

  This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …

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