• Will IBM i Become More Like Linux?

  June 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The recent launch of Merlin, a Linux-based collection of tools for creating next-gen IBM i applications, has raised questions about the future of IBM i. One of the questions has to do with IBM i’s relationship with Linux, and whether it will have to be become more like Linux to survive. Just like IBM i had to become more like Unix and Windows Server, in many ways, to survive.

  Merlin is a different sort of product than what IBM typically ships. For starters, it isn’t a modernization tool per se, but more like a collection of tools that allow …

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• More IBM i Merlin Details Emerge at POWERUp

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We are getting a more complete picture of IBM i Merlin, the DevOps offering that IBM introduced last month with the launch of IBM i 7.5. Among the most interesting revelations at COMMON’s annual POWERUp conference last week is that Merlin will be a vehicle for delivering a range of functionality to the platform in the future, not necessarily limited to app dev.

  IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, or Merlin, is a new offering from IBM. The software, as it exists in its first incarnation, enables users to develop IBM i application in ILE languages through an …

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• How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

  What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …

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• IBM i Community Reacts to IBM i 7.5

  May 11, 2022 Alex Woodie

  With the first new version of IBM i in over three years, IBM has certainly captured the attention of the IBM i community. But what do users think of the new release? What’s catching their eyes? We queried a few members of the community to find out.

  IBM Merlin, a new licensed product that stands for Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, appeared to capture the bulk of the initial attention around the launch of IBM i 7.5.

  Consisting of VS Code IDE, DevOps and CI/CD software from Git and Jenkins, and IBM i-native tools from ARCAD Software — all …

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• Power Private Cloud Gets More Cloudy With Pricing Tweaks

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As promised two years ago, Big Blue has been gradually and steadily transforming from a business model where it sells machines and perpetual software licenses and support for the both of them to a model where it sells capacity based on usage like a big cloud – like its own IBM Cloud – does.

  As part of the May 3 announcements, IBM has made a few changes to its Power Private Cloud Solution – the word “solution” has become basically useless in the context of IT, just like “offering” has, and I tell writers that I work with that if …

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• IBM Merlin Brings New Approach to Developing on IBM i

  May 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM is rolling out a new application development framework dubbed Merlin as part of its release of IBM i version 7.5. Designed primarily as a lightweight alternative to RDi and running in containers, Merlin could provide a guide for how IBM sources and distributes development tools going forward.

  Merlin is a new Licensed Program Product (LPP) offering from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch, or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from …

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• Instana Brings Observability to IBM i Applications

  April 6, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It can be hard to figure out what’s causing application performance problems in the modern cloud- and microservices-based era. One possible solution that IBM i shops may look to is IBM Observability by Instana APM, an application performance management solution that now supports IBM i.

  Instana was founded in 2015 with the goal of providing observability into a new generation of applications that are cloud-native, which typically means that they run in a containerized fashion (often atop Kubernetes), and communicate using microservices. IBM announced its intent to acquire the Chicago-based company in November 2020, and completed the deal about a …

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• Project Aims to Port .NET Framework to Power

  March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM and its Red Hat subsidiary are working with Microsoft to port the .NET Framework to Power, IT Jungle has learned. The project has been underway for a while, and the first bits of beta code should be available for developers to play with later this year.

  Ever since it released .NET Compiler Platform codenamed “Roslyn” at the Build conference in April 2014, which it followed up with the release of .NET Core back later that year, Microsoft has been courting the open source world with its flagship development environment. This represented a big shift in strategy for the Redmond, …

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• IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.

  But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …

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• Talking IBM i Shop With New Power Systems GM Ken King

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every new general manager of the AS/400 division and its successors all the way up to the current Power Systems division – which hopefully is no longer called Cognitive Systems in the financials but nowhere else – inherits a unique configuration of that business in time and space and after one, two, or three years leaves it in another configuration.

  In all of our years of writing The Four Hundred, we have made an effort to get to know each and every one of them. Last July, ahead of the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business in November, …

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