• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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• Apache Kafka And Zookeeper Now Supported On IBM i

  September 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM quietly added support for two open source technologies, Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper, on IBM i. Both projects are critical elements of emerging distributed computing frameworks in the big data space, although they have very different uses.

  Apache Zookeeper is a core underlying technology for enabling distributed computing and ensuring that applications running atop Zookeeper are highly resilient. The software functions as a centralized service for keeping track of nodes in a cluster, and for synchronizing data and services among the different nodes.

  All of the nodes in a Zookeeper cluster have access to a shared hierarchical namespace. If …

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• Man-DB Brings Documentation to IBM i

  August 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who have a question about how a particular command or feature works in open source packages now have an easy way to look up documentations, thanks to the addition of support for the Man-DB utility in IBM i, which IBM unveiled in late July.

  Man-DB is an open source implementation of the standard Unix documentation system. It provides a mechanism for easily accessing the documentation that exists for open source packages, such as the Node.js language, or even for commands, like Curl.

  The software, which can be installed via YUM, only works with open source software on …

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• The Power S812 Gets Yet Another Stay Of Execution

  July 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power S812 entry server, which is based on the Power8 processor and which has no analog in the Power9-based Power Systems lineup, has received yet another reprieve from being removed from the Big Blue product catalog. It is a wonder why IBM doesn’t just say it will sell this Lazarus machine indefinitely and get it over with, to be honest.

  The Power S812, particularly the “Mini” variant that IBM announced on Valentine’s Day in 2017, are the skinniest – in terms of processing and memory capacity – of the Power Systems line that supports the IBM i operating …

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• More Open Source Databases Coming To IBM i

  June 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM is in the process of bringing several new open source databases to the IBM i platform, including schema-less NoSQL databases as well traditional relational systems. Among the databases that Rochester is targeting are MongoDB, arguably the most popular NoSQL database and a favorite among Web and mobile developers, as well as PostgreSQL, one of the industry’s oldest and most widely used relational databases.

  Databases today almost are like programming languages, with developers mixing and matching databases to handle different functions, often within the same application. DB-Engines.com tracks more than 330 distinct databases, while there are somewhere around 700 programming …

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• Syncsort’s Pitney Bowes Deal: All About Good, Clean Data

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort completed its $700 million acquisition of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business last week, just in time to get a piece of the end-of-year IT spending extravaganza. As Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers sees it, the deal will bring a host of benefits to existing Syncsort customers, particularly as it relates to feeding next-gen analytics systems with good, clean data.

  The Pitney Bowes deal brings Syncsort new solutions that it can sell to business intelligence and data analytics organizations, including data quality, data cleansing, data matching, and data discovery tools. It also brings master data management (MDM) capabilities to Syncsort, …

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• Data Protection in the New Regulated Era

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies must protect their data from all sorts of threats these days, including power outages, failed servers, and drive crashes. But one of the most important aspects of data protection today is ensuring the security and privacy of data, which is mandated by a slew of emerging data regulations.

  In May 2018, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a far-reaching new law that gave people sweeping new rights over their data. While GDPR ostensibly just impacts EU citizens, many large companies in the U.S. and other countries adopted new security and privacy processes to ensure consistence …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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