• Facing The Challenges Of Upgrading Old Systems With The Cloud

  September 18, 2023 Jason Hardy

  If you are one of the many IBM i shops that has always created its own applications and that has a long history of investing in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms over the past three and a half decades at reasonably regular intervals to keep the hardware and the systems software current, you have it relatively easy and we definitely want to talk to you about your move to the cloud and how we might help.

  But if you are one of the many OS/400 and IBM i shops that have, for myriad reasons, gotten stuck …

  Read more

• Low-End IBM i P05 And P10 Tiers Go Subscription-Only Pricing First

  September 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were away for our annual summer hiatus relating to the Labor Day holiday in America when Big Blue decided, as we anticipated in mid-August, that it would begin the shift to all-subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system, the integrated Db2 for i relational database, and the related IBM i Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that have been commonly used by Power Systems customers all through the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i generations.

  Back in February, subscription pricing for the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database was made available under subscription …

  Read more

• How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?

  August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.

  Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …

  Read more

• Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.

  This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …

  Read more

• Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM Hypervisor

  May 22, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) put out a notice on Wednesday, May 17, to inform the Power Systems installed base that there is a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor. You can see the PSIRT notice at this link and the Security Bulletin: This Power System firmware update is being released to address CVE 2023-30438 at this link. This has a CVSS base score of 9.3, which means it is critical.

  We very rarely see any security vulnerabilities being reported for the PowerVM hypervisor or for the IBM i operating system itself, for that matter, …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

  Read more

• OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops

  May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …

  Read more

• IBM Updates Performance Guide For Latest Power10 Iron

  May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what system you are talking about, no matter what kind of applications you are running, there are always ways to squeeze more performance out of the system. The IBM i platform running atop Power10 and earlier processors is no exception, and to that end, for several years now Big Blue has provided some guidance on pushing performance with each new CPU family and as new features are added to the OS/400 and IBM i software stack.

  The latest such update, according to Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i platform, has just been published, and you can …

  Read more

• Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.

  And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …

  Read more

• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles