• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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• How Much Software Budget Does AI Drive?

  December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fake brain-like software based on neural networks is all the rage now, and probably will be for the next decade or so, but you may be surprised at how much money is being spent on software that has some sort of AI embedded in it and also to learn what a small piece of the overall IT market that this AI software represents at this point in IT history.

  The market researchers and prognosticators at Gartner recently tried to case the AI software market, and looked at how much money the top five use cases for software that have AI …

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• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December. and since nothing much else is going on, let’s take a quick waltz through the IT Jungle archives to see what kind of year it was. It all started back in January, when…

  Our esteemed founding editor tried to convince IBM what is plainly obvious: That the IBM i installed base is “still its very largest enterprise computing customer base” (emphasis added). Yes, there are more Red Hat licenses, but when it comes to unique companies, IBM i, with around 120,000 customers around the world, is still tops. Will IBM do the hard work to find a (virtualized) …

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• Supply Chain Problems Cause Power Systems SAS Controller Shortage

  December 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic has been doing strange things to the world’s supply chains for nearly two years now, and all things considered, the Power Systems platform has been largely spared from any serious issues. Until now.

  We have just caught wind of a notice that Tech Data has sent out to all of its Power Systems business partners that IBM has plenty of SAS disk drives and SAS flash drives, but that “demand currently exceeds supply availability” for SAS controllers and SAS backplanes. The shortage just hit hard in the past week or so, and now orders that have SAS …

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• The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.

  These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …

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• Getting Started With Connectria’s Hybrid IBM i And AIX Architecture

  November 29, 2021 Roy Flowers

  As a leading provider of IBM i systems, we know the ins and outs around your mission critical systems and their importance to your business. As an AWS advanced consulting partner, we’ve also worked with many customers on the best ways to achieve their cloud migration goals.

  When considering projects around digital transformation, it’s important to maintain realistic expectations. To keep you on track while on your cloud journey, it becomes essential to organize and plan your digital transformation into a more manageable process consisting of small steps towards big goals.

  Time and time again, we find that users target …

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• A Year Later: Diving Deeper into How Connectria Brings IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 17, 2021 David Wilderman

  Connectria has worked in the IBM i and AIX hosting business since 2000. We have strong expertise in both IBM and cloud; we’ve offered IBM i private cloud services and support for more than a decade. We work with a great deal of Power Systems users who are making strides toward the cloud, as many have in the last year thanks to soaring cloud demand in the wake of the pandemic.

  Traditionally, we have helped IBM users by augmenting their existing staff as they retire or turnover by handling production workloads and delivering managed services with capability, not just hardware. …

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• Talking Certified Pre-Owned Equipment With Arrow

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Arrow Electronics is one of the three master distributors of IBM Power Systems machines and related storage in North America, and it also has decades of experience selling secondhand equipment as well as new gear through its partnership with IBM.

  Recently, Arrow has partnered with IBM so its resellers can offer their Power Systems and Storage customers certified pre-owned equipment that has been put through the remanufacturing processes of IBM’s Global Asset Recovery Services business. This is now the sole means by which Arrow is helping its resellers bring CPO machinery to Power Systems and Storage shops that, for many …

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• IBM Adds ServicePacs For Power Machine Setup, Other Tweaks

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The legacy IBM Company from decades gone by charged a hell of a lot for its systems and offered a slew of handholding to make it all worthwhile. Somewhere along the way, service became a profit center and a revenue driver instead of an attitude about customer service, and you can’t entirely blame IBM because time is money and people don’t obey Moore’s Law economics.

  The ServicePac offerings that Big Blue has put together in recent years, which cover just about every aspect of its hardware and software stack, seem like a mix of old and new. Yes, the services …

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• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

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