• In A Parallel Universe, There Is An IBM i Data Warehouse, Too

  November 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the many years that we have been watching the Power Systems business – which is all of them, starting with the original RS/6000 announcement in February 1990, the first announcement we ever attended and at IBM’s original headquarters at 590 Madison in New York City – we have seen time and time again how Big Blue has rolled out parallel cluster data warehouse configurations for its AIX customers.

  Somehow, the IBM i platform and predecessor OS/400 platform have never been shown the same respect. Despite the fact that there are midrange and large enterprise customers who would very likely …

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• ATS Bolsters Power Cloud, IBM i Data Collection Suite

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  ATS Group announced yesterday that it has expanded its Power Cloud, the IBM Power-based private cloud that offers IBM i, AIX, and Linux runtimes. The company also announced that it has enhanced the IBM i data collection capabilities in Galileo Suite, its collection of IT monitoring and observability.

  ATS Group is an IBM business partner based in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The company says it has managed thousands of customer environments in its Power Cloud, which is spread across four geographically separate data centers.

  In a blog post yesterday, the company announced that it has expanded its private cloud offering. The company …

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• Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks

  November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.

  In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …

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• Power Systems Still Climbing Despite This Weird Economy

  October 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, IBM used to talk about System z, Power Systems, and storage as separate things because they are, largely, separate things. Even if customers of the mainframe and Power platforms sometimes buy IBM storage for their machines, and even if some of that storage is actually based on Power platforms themselves.

  But to be able to brag about the System z business every quarter and to make the rest of its Infrastructure group look like a bigger thing, Big Blue merged its Power Systems and Storage divisions into something it has called Distributed Systems for the …

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• Understanding The Power Of Power10

  October 25, 2023 Laurie LeBlanc

  The Power10 doesn’t disappoint when it comes to performance, reliability, availability, and security. But that’s not all it provides. With support for hybrid cloud, poised to support AI, and unmatched scalability, the Power10 will help you move into the future.

  We all know one of the best things about IBM Power running IBM i is that it is stable and reliable – so reliable that some companies keep their hardware for 10 years or more. While this could be viewed as a good thing for the business, there are many reasons to upgrade your hardware. Legacy hardware increases your risk …

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• Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

  October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

  If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

  Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …

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• The Science Of Lifting And Shifting To The Cloud

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies in Japan have a long and deep history with IBM computing systems, both its mainframe and its midrange platforms. And in some cases, they have moved from one to the other to maintain the IBM style of integrated systems while attaining the benefits of what many customers still consider the more integrated, less expensive, and easier to use platform that Big Blue offers: Namely, the AS/400 launched in 1988 and its progeny up through the current IBM i generation.

  Such is the case with Kosei Securities Co Ltd, which was founded way back in 1961 in Osaka, a …

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• IBM Bolsters Database Security with Guardium 12.0

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the Guardium database security software is expected to help customers detect insider threats faster and better comply with audit mandates, according to IBM. Guardium 12.0 also brings expanded support for databases and easier management in hybrid cloud environments, the company says.

  IBM bought Guardium back in 2009 in order to improve its capability to monitor databases for possible security violations and SQL injection attacks. The security software helped to automate database security tasks by implementing a policy-based control layer for transactions as well as anomaly detection routines to single out potentially criminal behavior that would otherwise …

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• The First Step In DevOps Is Not Tools, But Culture Change

  September 25, 2023 Andrew Clark

  The combination and automation of application development and IT operations, commonly known as DevOps, is itself like the processes it automates – it is a process of continual change through iteration and improvement. And so, like most things in life (other than vacation, maybe), it is a journey – not a destination.

  When people think about a DevOps roadmap journey, they are typically thinking about putting in some kind of DevOps tooling like git or Jenkins; this is really not the place to start – the first step on the DevOps roadmap, for most companies, is actually a culture change. …

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• Rocket Buys Data Integration Provider B.O.S.

  September 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software has announced the acquisition of B.O.S., a German provider of data integration software. While the software company targets primarily the mainframe with its data integration solutions, Rocket says it’s considering broadening support to IBM i.

  B.O.S. was founded more than 30 years ago to develop data integration solutions that connect the IBM mainframe to other systems. It boasts more than 1,200 installations in 25 countries, including Fortune 50 firms as well as government organizations.

  The company’s flagship product, called tcVision, helps customers move data from their mainframe sources, such as Db2, IMS, VSAM files, ADABAS, and CA DATACOM, …

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