• State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Systems

  February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we talked about the upgrade cycle for the IBM i operating systems over more than a decade based on the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey done by Fortra and pretty heavily massaged by us to reflect what we think is closer to reality for the IBM i market at large.

  No matter if you look at the raw data from the survey or the more elaborate model we have built derived from the past eleven surveys, one thing is clear: There is a regular pattern for Power Systems upgrades among OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …

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• Dell And Big Blue Call It Quits On Storage Driver Support For IBM i

  December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM and sometime rival Dell Technologies are having a tiff over the licensing of technology that allows disk arrays descended from the venerable Symmetrix arrays created by EMC more than three decades ago to link to descendants of the AS/400 platform and OS/400 operating systems created three and a half decades ago.

  The fallout from what we presume is that a technology licensing fee agreement between Dell and IBM is similar, we think, to the one between IBM and the company that owns Information Builders. In October 2023, out of the blue, IBM announced that it was …

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• CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.

  Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …

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• Untangling Legacy Spaghetti Code To Cook Up Microservices

  August 12, 2024 Michel Mouchon

  At this point in the history of programming, everyone pretty much knows what microservices are and everybody is more than acquainted with the legacy code – and often monolithic code – that has been created over decades by countless programmers who have evolved corporate applications to fit new conditions and new demands.

  It is often called spaghetti code, and for good reason. The code is often a tangled mess of business logic and data – presumably the data is the meatballs and the user interface is the sauce in this metaphor. (It is important to not take a metaphor too …

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• Xorux Is Gaining Traction With LPAR2RRD System Monitoring

  July 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  System monitoring and management is a lot more complicated these days than it was back in the early days of the AS/400 or even the middle years of the iSeries. To start, there are physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual storage, and physical and virtual networking to deal with, and finding a tool – or a set of integrated tools – that can do that, and do it across disparate and incompatible platforms, is a big ask.

  But a little known software company called Xorux, which is based in Prague in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, actually …

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• Celerity Buys Chilli IT To Expand Its Power Systems Business

  June 24, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like so many companies that have been part of the AS/400 ecosystem, both Celerity and Chilli IT are relatively small firms with long histories in peddling Power-based systems from IBM and who expanded into providing managed services over the years. Celerity and Chilli IT are also similar in another way in that both are based in the United Kingdom and largely serve customers in the British Isles.

  Now, they are one company in the wake of a partnership that the two companies formed back in February that turned into an outright acquisition a few weeks ago, with Celerity buying Chilli …

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• What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At

  May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.

  After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012

  May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.

  Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …

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• IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

  May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

  Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …

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• What Big Blue’s HashiCorp Buy Might Mean For The IBM i Platform

  May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a riddle for you, or even two. Why did IBM buy systems software maker HashiCorp for $6.4 billion? And what on Earth, if anything, will this mean for IBM i customers, or even Power Systems customers in general?

  If you want to get a deeper background into HashiCorp, check out the Related Stories link at the bottom of this story for the detailed analysis I have done on the company over at The Next Platform. In the meantime, a short overview of HashiCorp and its tools is in order.

  Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, the co-founders of …

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