• 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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• The IBM i Marketplace Survey Is Open For You

  October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How many times a day do people tell you what you know matters? Well, it does, and I am telling you. But that knowledge of your IBM i environment is not doing anyone any good, stuck inside of your noggin. To get a realistic sense of what is actually going on out there in IBM i Land, we need you to pipe up.

  The 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and will be for a few more weeks. But we don’t want you to wait until the last minute to participate. Please …

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• We Need Some Insight From You

  October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What you are doing – and what you are not doing – with you IBM i platform is important to us. And that is why we are asking you to take the 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall.

  This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base.

  The data that this survey gathers is invaluable, and long-time readers of The Four Hundred know full …

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• It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The 9^th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and if we hope to get some insight into what is going on in the base and report back on it in January 2023, we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.

  This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base. …

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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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• Withdrawal Symptoms: A Bunch Of IBM Services Tweaks, Storage Deleted

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every product comes to the end of its life cycle, whether it is hardware or software or even services because it is troublesome to repair or troubleshoot the old stuff as it wears out (in the case of hardware) or suffers from bit rot (in the case of software) or brain drain (in the case of services). And so it is with a bunch of different things that affect some big Power Systems shops.

  With a bunch of new Technical Account Manager (TAM) and ServicePac services offerings for the Power Systems line, which we wrote about back in August, …

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