• Generative AI Is Part Of Application Modernization Now

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Generative AI is funny in that it is both an application in its own right when equipped with a chatbot interface and some intelligent prompting with guardrails to keep it from hallucinating and it can also be used as a tool to either generate chunks of applications based on large language models tweaked with a library of code.

  This is the first time that we can think of where the application is the tool or the tool is the application, and it presents a kind of chicken and egg conundrum for IT departments all over the world. Mainly: Where do …

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• Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.

  As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …

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• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Power Systems Down A Bit, But Holding Steady In Q2

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering that we are over a year into the Power10 entry and midrange server upgrade cycle, and almost two years into the Power10 high-end cycle, the fact that the Power Systems server business is only down a few points in the second quarter is, well, normal. As in the old normal where things have a natural ebb and flow and the business is not just in a kind of 45 degree decline like we saw a decade ago.

  This is what happens when Big Blue sticks to its enterprise computing knitting and is not distracted by the money-losing proposition of …

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• The Last Power8 Machine Gets End Of Service Notice

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in November 2022, amongst a slew of other machinery, customers using the vast majority of the Power Systems servers based on the Power8 processor were warned that IBM was cutting off its maintenance and support for these machines effective between March and October 2024. That may sound like a long time from now, but it really isn’t when you have to hustle a system upgrade, complete with application software, through the budgetary and testing hoops.

  We wrote about those Power8 system withdrawals here, and in case you need to dig out the notice again, the new IBM Documentation system …

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• A Slew Of Power Systems Features Are Being Sunsetted

  July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has long since stopped selling Power8 machinery and has been winding down sales of Power9-based systems as its Power10 machines, which made their debut in late 2021 and early 2022, are ascending. So, it is natural that features for Power8 and Power9 machinery are being withdrawn. But even some features with the newer Power10 machines are also being withdrawn, in some cases because supplies are running out and in other cases because better features have been introduced.

  You have to keep up with these things so you can get what you need before IBM stops selling whatever that …

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• The Majority Of Large Enterprises To Boost IT Staff This Year

  July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The sample is small, the data is a little bit musty, but the news is good.

  Back in October and November last year, the market researchers at Gartner did a survey of chief information officers at large enterprises and 501 people responded from all over the world; 182 of them were from North America, Europe/Africa/Middle East, and Asia/Pacific, which means by definition that Central America and South America were over-represented a bit in the survey. So take these results with a grain of salt, and maybe some pepper.

  By Gartner’s definition, a large enterprise is one with $1 billion or …

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• Big Blue Offers Cheaper Standard Shipping For IBM i Systems

  July 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Since the dawn of time, one kind of shipping and handling was bundled into the price of AS/400 and successor systems. But that has just changed. Now, Big Blue is offering two tiers of shipping and handling for machinery it ships to customers, including Power Systems servers and current in its IBM Storage lineup of tape, disk, and flash products – and it is giving the customers a choice on how they want things shipped and therefore what price they will pay.

  This change was inevitable, and frankly, given the high costs of shipping anything these days, it is amazing …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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