• An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

  April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.

  And work, of course. …

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• Storage Helps Power Systems Grow In The First Quarter

  April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a peculiar thing: It is almost like there are two different Power Systems customer sets. Those that spend big in the second quarter and fourth quarter of every year and those that spend less big in the first and third quarters of every year.

  While we understand the normal Q4 bump that happens because there are decades of traditions, founded on good budgetary and capacity planning practices, we are a bit perplexed why when it comes to the Power Systems market at least, Q2 is almost as good revenue-wise as the prior Q4. We admit fully that this …

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• Using The Public Cloud For IBM i Disaster Recovery

  April 24, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Disasters can strike at any time, and it’s essential for organizations to have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. However, creating and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, particularly for organizations that rely on IBM i servers, often running business critical applications that perform key functions together with many interfaces into other servers and applications.

  Previously, investments in IBM i disaster recovery solutions were an expensive outlay, requiring significant capital investment in both hardware and software, in addition to the sizable costs associated with running a datacenter.

  Fortunately, with the advent …

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• Tweaks To The Power Software Stack, And Red Hat Gets Easier

  April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system, its database, and the related systems and development tools for IBM i, you can bet Elon Musk’s last dollar that there will also be nips and tucks, and sometimes more significant changes, to the adjunct software that runs on Power Systems iron. Such as the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the PowerSC security tools, and other things.

  And indeed, as part of the April 11 announcements, IBM has tweaked this Power Systems stuff. This is not one of the big ones, as …

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• Technology Refreshes, And Maybe Some Hardware Tweaks, Coming This Week

  April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have heard through the rumor mill for weeks that we should expect Technology Refreshes for the current releases of IBM i sometime this week, and Tuesday being a traditional announcement day for Big Blue, it is reasonable to assume that this will happen on April 11. With history as a guide, it is reasonable to also assume that there will be some kind of tweaks to the Power Systems hardware and to parts of the software stack that IBM has on this machines, including but not limited to, IBM i.

  This being the belly of the Power10 hardware cycle, …

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• 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 …

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• Blazing The Trail For VTL In The Cloud

  March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Making the decision to move IBM i applications to the cloud is a relatively easy endeavor. But covering all of the bases, particularly when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, takes some thought because even though the cloud is an ideal place to do HA and DR, not every cloud does it right. And doing it right often means using a mix of technologies and service providers.

  IT managers are thinking of moving their IBM i workloads to the cloud for good reasons. They do the math, they weigh the risks and rewards. They take into account all …

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• IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

  As we have pointed out …

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• Superior Support: One Of The Reasons You Pay The Power Systems Premium

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are advocating for the Power Systems platform, and the IBM i operating system on top of it, within your organization, you need every bit of evidence you can find that demonstrates the return on investment for that premium price.

  Which is why we are pointing out an IDC MarketScape study that Big Blue just posted as a reprint on its download site covering worldwide support services for the global leaders in enterprise IT. You know, companies like IBM as well as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Pure Storage, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, Juniper Networks, and …

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• When You Need Us, We Are Ready To Do Grunt Work

  March 22, 2023 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  There are two secrets to success for any cloud or any service provider. First, get the best people, ones that understand people, business, and technology. Second, automate everything that can be automated because that is the only way the business will be able to scale and not collapse under the weight of the expense of – and difficulty in – hiring the next batch of people to grow the business.

  A third thing might be hire people who can constantly automate themselves out of a job, but who also find new and valuable jobs to do.

  To be a managed …

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