• Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud

  November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.

  We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …

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• Flash Storage Is Table Stakes For Any IBM i Cloud

  October 31, 2022 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  After a long wait, the IBM i market is finally entering the true cloud era, one where utility pricing, performance, flexible capacity, and managed services are all available for companies running the IBM i operating system and RPG, Java, PHP, and sometimes COBOL applications against the Db2 for i relational database.

  But there are clouds, and then there are things that should not rightly be called a cloud.

  And we think that if you are a modern cloud, then your primary storage has to be flash and that there is no place for a hard disk drive based on spinning …

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• Rocket Rides Modernization, DevOps for Hybrid Cloud Adoption

  October 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Puneet Kohli, Rocket Software’s new IBM i portfolio manager, is under no illusion about how easy it will be to boost IBM i software sales. “This is not a space where you wake up one morning and your CIO says ‘I’m going to go buy a product on the i,’” Kohli says. But a well-thought-out strategy around enabling DevOps and application modernization in a hybrid cloud setting? Now that just might move the needle.

  It’s been almost a year since Rocket Software founder Andy Youniss stepped down from the day-to-day management of the company he led for 31 years, paving …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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• Power Systems Revenues Look To Grow In 2022

  October 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was a pretty good third quarter for Big Blue on many fronts if you overlook a $5.76 billion writedown as it has transferred some of its pension obligations for retired employees to a third party to get them off its books forever. This is the second straight quarter that, ignoring this massive hit to the books, which was actually offset by some tax benefits IBM cashed in at the same time, the company has shown both revenue and profit growth.

  This may not be the IBM of our salad days, but it is a far cry better from the …

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• Doing Disaster Recovery Planning Right For Your IBM Power Iron

  October 19, 2022 Jason Hardy

  As I was writing this article, I saw this in my LinkedIn news feed, according to Axios.com: “billion-dollar weather disasters now happen once every 18 days.” My perception was that the United States was getting more frequent significant weather events and it turns out that data from the National Weather Service backs that up.

  Now add in hardware/software failures, cyber security events and local disasters (fire, water damage, power outages) and it makes sense that disaster recovery is one of the top challenges facing CIOs today. If this is a topic you are contemplating, here are a few questions to …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.

  Hal Schwartz, president at CloudFirst, got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in San Bernardino back in 1988, and worked in sales at CAC Leasing outside of New York City before starting his own leasing company, called …

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• Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.

  In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …

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• It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry

  October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.

  And so, back in 2014, IBM …

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• Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.

  For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …

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