• You Can’t Just Keep Doing What You Have Always Done

  November 30, 2020 Rob McNelly

  There are philosophical differences that exist between people regarding the best ways to configure, manage, and maintain infrastructure, and this holds as true for infrastructure built around IBM i as it is for other kinds of platforms. The easiest and fastest thing to do – and what makes the most sense according to plenty of people – is to do what they have always done. Just keep replicating the past out into the future to infinity.

  Others point out that this mindset stifles progress and ignores all of the innovations that have come to the IBM i platform through the …

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• Connectria Bringing IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that want greater integration between their IBM i and cloud systems may be interested in a new offering unveiled yesterday by Connectria. In January, the private cloud company is planning to launch a new hybrid cloud offering that delivers a low latency connection between its hosted IBM i environments and AWS data centers located on the East and West coasts.

  Connectria says its new hybrid cloud offering provides an “ultra-low latency direct connection” between its IBM i and AIX resources and Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions. With just 2 milliseconds of latency between Connectria’s Power Systems …

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• Profound and Connectria Hook Up in Cloud-Modernization Push

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i modernization tool provider Profound Logic and Connectria, one of the biggest private cloud providers for IBM i, announced a strategic partnership last week. The goal of the union, representatives with both companies say, is to give their respective IBM i customers a leg up as they seek to streamline their IT systems.

  Matt Biegacki, the vice president and chief marketing officer for Connectria, and Michael Killian, the vice president of strategic accounts for Profound Logic, shared their thoughts on the partnership during a call with IT Jungle this week.

  From Profound Logic’s perspective, the partnership with …

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• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster The Core IBM i OS

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Technology Refresh (TR) day for IBM and its IBM i operating system, and Big Blue didn’t disappoint. The company unveiled new releases of IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 that bring a slew of new capabilities to the core operating system as well as surrounding offerings like Db2 Mirror, ACS, and RDi. In this article, we’ll look at enhancements to the core OS and related key features.

  During a COMMON webcast Tuesday, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will touched broadly on a number of enhancements that soon will be available in the TRs. Most of the new capabilities will …

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• Four Things That IBM i Shops Get Wrong About HA, DR, And Data

  July 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) It’s always a little hard to generalize, but IBM i shops tend to be conservative, thoughtful, and thorough when it comes to running IT. But no IT organization is perfect, and there are still issues when it comes to disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA).

  We think this is more often a reflection of the situation than it is of the people running IBM i systems. And to get a sense of the HA and DR missteps that people are making, we had a chat with Lilac Schoenbeck, Vice President of go-to-market strategy in the …

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• Cobalt Iron Supports Multiple LPARs with VTL

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops will be able to back up multiple LPARs to an individual virtual tape library (VTL) from Cobalt Iron, the company announced recently. The new capability overcomes a limitation that has existed since the company started to support IBM i with its data protection service a couple of years ago.

  Cobalt Iron is a Lawrence, Kansas-based provider of enterprise data protection services. The company’s flagship offering, called Compass, provides backup, recovery, and related services for or all major computer platforms, including servers running on-prem, virtualized environments, and systems and applications running in clouds.

  Some of Cobalt Iron’s customers …

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• What’s New With Db2 Web Query?

  May 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Db2 Web Query, which is IBM’s strategic business intelligence tool for IBM i, doesn’t follow the same release cycle as the operating system itself. But as part of activity surrounding the latest round of Technology Refreshes (TR) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, IBM discussed the recent updates that it’s made to Db2 Web Query, along with new features that are due very soon.

  To get the lowdown on the new Db2 Web Query features, we tuned into a recent presentation made by Doug Mack, IBM’s Db2 Web Query product manager. Mack presented a session with Db2 for i …

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• Sharing Tape Libraries Across Partitions Without VIOS

  May 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a love-hate relationship when it comes to the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS. With the latest IBM i Technology Refresh, IBM is giving the anti-VIOS group a feature they have been requesting: the capability to easily share a tape library among multiple logical partitions, or LPARs without involving VIOS, SANs, or multiple adapters.

  IBM is calling the new feature “IBM i Virtualization for Tape Libraries,” and it’s based on RFE (request for enhancement) number 127631. While the words “tape libraries” and “virtualization” are in there, this is not a virtual tape library (VTL) solution. That already …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 1

  February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is the time of the year that people assess where we are at so we can figure out where we are going. So we think it is appropriate to ponder the current state of the IBM i business.

  There isn’t just historical precedent for pondering the state of things this time of year; the pondering, in a certain way, drives history. The end of the prior year is mostly gone from memory and focus shifts toward fulfilling the promise of the current year. It is human nature to mark time this way, driven in part by the seasonal nature …

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