• 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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• IBM Says Nothing About Power Systems In Q4

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of its spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, which represented about a third of the company’s revenues and employees, Big Blue has changed the way it organizes its groups and divisions which, generally speaking, more accurately reflects what it sells and the underlying systems business that is International Business Machines.

  Which is great. We have been kvetching about this since 2016, the last time IBM reorganized its business and its financials, so hooray. And we did a preview of the new financial reporting segments, and how IBM backcast them into 2020, with our own revenue …

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• Domino 12 Comes To IBM i

  August 16, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HCL Technologies, which now owns the Lotus Notes and Domino family, started shipping Domino 12 two months ago. Surprisingly, the new version is now available on the IBM i platform, where a substantial number of companies still run Notes and Domino applications.

  Back in late 2017, you will remember, an agreement was struck between IBM and HCL Technologies regarding Notes and Domino, the groupware software that had languished on the Big Blue vine for years. HCL made development of Domino 10 a priority, and finally shipped the 10th edition of the product on IBM i in early 2019. …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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• IBM i Wish List: Add A Virtual IBM i Platform Like System z Wazi

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Serendipity is a funny thing; part serene and part dippy, I suppose. I was poking around for something interesting that might be relevant to the IBM i platform, and ran across announcement letter 221-122, which was for something called IBM Wazi Developer  for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. I had recently heard of CodeReady Workspaces because of the recent Power Systems announcements, but I had no idea what Wazi was.

  What I now know is that I want this in an IBM i flavor.

  There is no such thing as a portable and cheap and ubiquitous System z mainframe environment, …

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• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

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