• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

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• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

  This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …

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• The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A couple of weeks ago, buried in the October Power Systems announcements, we told you about the new NVM-Express flash cards that Big Blue brought to the Power iron and that are specifically enabled in the IBM i 7.4 release with Technology Refresh 1, or TR1. We didn’t have a lot of detail back then about the new drives other than some capacities and pricing, but we know more now and we are going to tell you what we know.

  We will circle back with Big Blue and have a discussion about what the addition of NVM-Express flash means – …

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• More Vintage Power Systems Stuff Gets The Plug Pulled

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are well into the Power9 era and looking ahead to the Power10 and Power11 era, so it is no surprise at all that IBM is looking to streamline its product catalog and empty out its barns of old equipment. In announcement letter 919-139, which somehow slipped our attention two weeks ago on October 22, a whole bunch of Power Systems stuff got the axe, with withdrawal dates ranging from right now until February 2020.

  On October 22, IBM i 6.1.1, with its machine code, will no longer be available for ordering on a slew of machines. This is …

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• Big Power8 Iron Gets A Reprieve, And More Power To You

  October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The big Power9 iron has been in the field for more than a year now, and IBM had every intention of removing the Power8-based Power E870C and Power E880 E880C from its product catalog by Halloween, and said as much on February 26 this year in an announcement that we covered about a slew of withdrawals for the Power Systems platform.

  In announcement 119-078, dated October 22, IBM has decided to keep the For Sale signs up on the eight-socket Power E870C and 16-socket Power E880C machines for an extra two months, and now you will be able …

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• After Seven Quarters Of Growth, Power Systems Declines

  October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The tough compares have hit home on IBM’s Power Systems business, but the good news is that this has happened after seven consecutive quarters of growth for the Power-based server business that Big Blue owns lock, stock, and barrel. Even with this decline, which was quite steep because of the triple whammy of tough compares (more on that in a moment), there is still a healthy underlying Power Systems business that is much better off than the last time it was hit by similar declines.

  Let’s take a look at the numbers for IBM’s Power Systems division and then work …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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• IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

  We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

  In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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• Power9 Prime Previews Future Power10 Memory Boost

  September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Customers who are deploying Linux on Power Systems iron from Big Blue are about to get a very substantial boost in memory bandwidth as IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9’ (that’s a prime symbol, not an apostrophe or a typo, after the 9) processor. As we previewed back in March 2018, the Power9’ chip will feature a substantially upgraded memory subsystem that has a new, faster SERDES signaling technology, normally used for various kinds of system and accelerator interconnect, that has been tweaked to support memory buffers and therefore DDR4 and future memories.

  There is no technical …

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