• Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.

  This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …

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• With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions

  August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.

  Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …

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• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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• SAP Raises Costs, Slashes Innovation for On-Prem Software

  August 9, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Companies that run SAP on-prem, including all of its IBM i customers, will be left out in the cold following the German ERP giant’s latest moves, which includes a 5 percent increase in annual on-prem support costs and a pledge from the CEO that all new “innovation” only will be delivered in the cloud.

  SAP, like most enterprise software vendors, has been trying to get its customers to move to cloud versions of its ERP software for some time. Moving customers to cloud subscriptions not only smooths out the revenue stream for companies like SAP compared to the sporadic …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Remote Managed Services Fill In For Retiring And Overburdened IT Staff

  July 10, 2023 Raymond Hammell

  If you manage an IT department, you’ve likely received that dreaded 2am phone call, or you’ve had to hire someone to replace a retiring IBM i systems administrator. And, if you’re like most IBM i professionals, you probably wish you had more time to focus on strategic activities (or take a vacation!) instead of worrying about day-to-day systems maintenance.

  Managing IBM i environments requires a specific set of skills that can be hard to come by, leaving IT departments struggling to keep up with growing infrastructure, data volumes and business demands. Tedious maintenance and repetitive tasks add to the burden …

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• IBM i Backup Provider Storagepipe Snapped Up By Thrive

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Storagepipe, a Toronto, Ontario-based provider of backup and recovery services for IBM i and other platforms, has been acquired by Thrive, a Massachusetts-based outsourcing company that provides a range of cloud-based IT services.

  Storagepipe has been backing up IBM i servers since it was founded back in 2001. Back in 2015, the last time we checked in with them, the company was utilizing an appliance-based approach to backing up IBM i servers, and any other Windows or Linux servers that customers wanted backed up.

  The backup would be pushed to the Storagepipe appliance, which would then replicate the backup off-site …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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• FNTS Launches Managed Services for Power Servers in IBM Cloud

  May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Have a Power server running in IBM Cloud but want someone else to provide the care and feeding? Then you might be interested in the new service unveiled by longtime IBM business partner FNTS to manage customers’ Power environments running in the IBM Cloud.

  FNTS is an Omaha, Nebraska, outfit that has been sailing the IBM i and mainframe seas for many years. The company, which previously went by the name First National Technology Solutions, was the IT branch of a former bank, First National of Nebraska Inc., that was spun out to providing hosting services more than 25 years …

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• Inside IBM’s Efforts To Modernize The ISV Army

  May 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” IBM executives must feel a bit like the eminently quotable Don Rumsfeld, former Secretary of the Department of Defense, as they marshal their assets in the battle for application supremacy. While some of Big Blue’s partners have honed their IBM i applications into modern weapons, others are fielding old equipment more suitable for a previous war.

  It’s no state secret that Big Blue has a legacy problem on its hands in the IBM i world. When the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

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