• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 48

  December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  To start right off, there is a security vulnerability in the Hardware Management Console, so those of you who have larger Power Systems that have their logical partitions managed by this out-of-band controller had better listen up. Specifically, check out Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Bind (CVE-2021-25219) affects Power HMC, which you can read about more here.

  The fixes for this security vulnerability are as follows:

  Product		VRMF			APAR			Remediation/Fix	
  Power HMC	V9.2.950.0 SP3 ppc	MB04373		MH01944
  Power HMC	V9.2.950.0 SP3 x86	MB04372		MH01943
  Power HMC	V10.1.1020.0 SP1 ppc	MB04363		MF70302
  Power HMC	V10.1.1020.0 SP1 x86	MB04362		MF70301
  

  As we …

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• IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan.

  Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle …

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• Court Throws Out Lawsuit From Chinese Power Systems Partner Against Big Blue

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not often that we get any insight into the geopolitical workings of the Power Systems business that is central to this publication and to all of you who work on the IBM i platform. Often, the only way we learn anything is when two parties sue each other in court. Such is the case with the lawsuit filed against Big Blue back in September 2021 by Beijing Neu Cloud Oriental System Technology. The lawsuit, as it turns out, was tossed out of court last week.

  China has presented as many challenges as it has opportunities for all …

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• A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

  First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

  When …

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• IBM Gives Temporary Reprieve For Power8 Core And Memory Activations

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is pretty generous when it comes to having features for past generations of machines available for purchase, even when they are two generations back from whatever it is currently selling. But sooner or later, IBM wants to sell the new machines and it stops selling the old stuff. Even if it is only processor and memory activations on machines that are already in the field, which is the easiest sale in the world because IBM doesn’t really have to do much.

  This may be the most profitable kind of sale that Big Blue does, but sooner or later, …

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• 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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