• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

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• Skytap Offers Deals and Discounts in IBM, Azure Clouds

  February 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM is offering up to $500 in free money for new customers who sign up for Skytap on IBM Cloud, a joint infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering between the two companies that allows customers to run IBM i, AIX, and Linux workloads in the IBM Cloud. Meanwhile, Skytap is offering a free upgrade to enterprise support for the remainder of 2021 for customers who sign up for its Power on Azure cloud IaaS offering.

  Skytap landed on IT Jungle’s radar in late 2018, when it announced it was building a “true cloud” offering for IBM i. …

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• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

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• The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

  This history continues, and is …

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• IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.

  As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …

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• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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• Taking The Full Measure Of Power Servers

  January 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Imagine, for a moment, that there was not a drive by the Chinese government to have more of its state-owned enterprises, which are among the largest companies in the country, adopt homegrown IT gear for their data processing needs, an effort that started in 2015 but really built up steam two years later when a trade war erupted between the United States and China. Imagine that trade war didn’t happen, either.

  What, pray tell, would have happened to IBM’s Power Systems business over the past several years? Our best guess is plenty. At the very least, perhaps the Power Systems …

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• IBM i Software And Power Systems Upgrades Keep Rolling Forward

  January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During tough economic times, I am fond of reminding people – and especially myself as I try to remain calm in a recession or whatever the heck this is we are dealing with now during the coronavirus pandemic – that business, in the aggregate, never goes to zero. No matter how bad it gets, thus far in the modern era starting perhaps with the Renaissance and maybe even longer but certainly since the agricultural and industrial revolutions in the 1700s, people still need stuff and they need people to grow or make it.

  That doesn’t mean it is easy, however. …

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• More Vintage Power Systems Feature Withdrawals

  January 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In with the new and out with the old is a common theme around this time of the year. It may not be officially spring yet – in fact, we are 71 days away from the vernal equinox here in the northern hemisphere – but Spring Cleaning can and does happen at any time in the IBM product catalog.

  And so it was as 2020 was coming to an end and after we had out the last issue of The Four Hundred for last year to bed.

  In announcement letter 920-167, IBM is withdrawing a number of different features …

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• Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride

  January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.

  It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …

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