• IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .

  February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.

  So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.

  In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March …

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• IBM Kills Off Fax/400, But Alternatives Are Available

  August 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM will cease supporting Facsimile Support for i, commonly known as Fax/400, with the next release of the IBM i operating system, it announced last month. That tees up an opportunity for third-party vendors like Fresche Solutions and others to fill the void for a communication technology that is still used by businesses.

  The IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX) product was not among the group of 16 IBM i products that IBM initially withdrew from sales and support with its discontinuance of support letter back on May 7, the same day that it announced the latest technology refreshes (TRs) …

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• Lost Data – The Silent Killer

  May 8, 2024 Richard Dolewski

  DATA is the BACKBONE of today’s organization. INFORMATION is the most valuable asset of the CORPORATION. When data is lost, held RANSOM, or simply unavailable, it negatively affects (and potentially halts) all desired business outcomes.

  Today’s dynamic business environments are based on a seamless flow of information. Organizations have invested in IT because they rely on technology to conduct business to sustain profitability.

  Systems of record that previously functioned in the background, include self-service and real-time connections, with endless application endpoints spanning across numerous clouds. Transaction flow of data now originates and is completed across numerous cloud interactions vs …

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• Lots Of Unanswered Questions On IBM i Subscriptions

  February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like all of you, we have been watching with great interest as Big Blue transitions the IBM i software stack and Power10 hardware to cloud-like, utility-style subscription pricing. We have watched how each part of the IBM i stack has been transformed from the perpetual (and sometimes user) license pricing scheme with Software Maintenance to a subscription.

  As far as we know, and as we reported back in September 2023 when the subscription pricing for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was revealed, March 26, 2024, is supposed to be the last day you will be able to …

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• IBM i Community Shares 2024 Predictions

  January 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Spaceship Earth has completed another trip around the Sun, which means one thing: Time for 2024 IBM i predictions! Hopefully you enjoy this year’s predictions, which seem to sport a good mixture of optimism and realism.

  The future for IBM i is wide open – open source, that is, says Liam Allan, the creator of Code for IBM i and a software developer for IBM i.

  “My prediction is pretty simple. Businesses will continue to invest in themselves through the power of open source,” Allan says. “Whether it be using dev tools, open source runtimes like Node.js, or even newer …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LightEdge Solutions

  December 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The nature of the IBM i market is changing as the nature of the IBM i installed base is changing. With skills in short supply – and getting shorter by the day – and the work piling higher and higher as companies try to tackle application modernization and integration, different ways of acquiring and consuming compute and storage, and modern data analytics and artificial intelligence, we are entering an age where managed service and cloud suppliers will usurp the position formerly held by the business partners who worked downstream from IBM peddling and supporting on-premises Power Systems machinery.

  Because variety …

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• IBM i Development Is Getting A Fresche Start With Some Ground-Breaking Subscriptions

  November 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Cash flows into and out of a business, and capital expenditures are always interrupting those flows. They are yanked out of the revenue streams and depreciated over long periods of time, meant to reflect the value these expenditures deliver. In most cases in the IBM midrange, the machines sit around longer than the depreciation schedule the accountants use, and that is perceived as a kind of free money when it is really a kind of mounting technical debt as machinery and the software that runs upon it fall behind both technically and economically.

  Eventually, the technical debt bill always comes …

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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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• The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

  But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …

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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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