• Big Blue Goes After Healthcare With Aggressive Power Systems Pricing

  March 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We often gently admonish the vendors in the IBM i market that they have to make news to be in the news and also to do something snazzy, like a special promotion or a price cut to get the attention of customers as well as to stimulate a little business for themselves and their partners. IBM is not excepted from this advice, and is actually doing it – at least for customers in the healthcare industry that run their applications on Power Systems iron.

  In announcement letter AD23-0111, dated March 12, IBM has put out a new 24-core Power10 …

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• StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.

  StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software …

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• It Would be Uncommon For IBM Announcements To Not Be In May

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as we can remember, there is a general trend of spring and fall announcements for the IBM midrange. It is not a perfect correlation, of course. The original AS/400 announcement was done on the summer solstice on June 21, 1988, which does not fit the pattern we are talking about. But in general, the spring-fall pattern is something that goes back long before enterprise Linux releases and OpenStack releases all shifted to an April-October cadence.

  This being a new year and the POWERUp2024 conference being held May 20 through 23 in Fort Worth, Texas, we are …

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• The Long And IBM i Road That Leads To Your Door

  March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the System/36 in 1983 or the AS/400 in 1988. No matter which line you want to draw, that is a long time for a continuously upgradable and upgraded operating system and database platform combination and its underlying hardware.

  Not only do the predecessors of the IBM …

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• PUB400: Your Free IBM i Playground

  March 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Search the Web for “free Linux server” and hundreds of results pop up. Do the same for “free IBM i server” and your results are much more limited. But what the universe of free IBM i servers lacks in quantity it makes up in quality thanks in large part to PUB400, a free IBM i instance that has been serving the midrange community for nearly a quarter century.

  Many IT Jungle readers undoubtedly are familiar with PUB400.com, which was started by Holger Scherer on a little AS/400 Model 150 back in 1999. Over the years, the site and the …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems

  February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …

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• Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

  Take that in for a second. Savor it.

  Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …

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• The IBM i Base Is Ready To Keep Investing In The Future

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are at the beginning of a new year, and of course that means that it was time for us to participate in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, which is sponsored by Fortra and which is now in its 10th year. We enjoy the webinar that Forta hosts to have a bunch of people from IBM and myself riff on what the survey results mean – and what they don’t mean.

  Our host on the webinar was Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, and we were joined by Douglas Gibbs and Dan Sundt, who …

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• IBM i Chief Architect Will Gives N2i Some Platform Pointers

  January 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to find someone more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the IBM i platform than Steve Will, who holds CTO and chief architect titles at IBM. So when Will accepted an invitation from COMMON’s N2i (New to IBM i) group to speak to IBM i newcomers this week, it was a good chance to pick up something new.

  One of the first things that IBM i newcomers will notice about the IBM i is that it’s an unusual platform, in several regards. For starters, it’s older than many platforms, being able to trace its lineage back to …

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• A Few Power Systems Items At The Cusp Of The New Year

  January 10, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome back, everyone. We hope you had a joyous vacation, and that you took your vitamins and got your rest to take on a new year.

  It is generally pretty quiet in the IT racket in late December of one year and early January in the next year, and the bridge between 2023 and 2024 is no different. But there were a few items that came to our attention that we want to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter AD23-1087, dated December 12, 2023, Big Blue has put some 5250 Enablement features that were withdrawn from marketing in …

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