• Drilling Down Into The Power E980

  August 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On August 7, IBM announced the two machines that are based on the “Cumulus” scale-up versions of the Power9 processors – the Power E950 midrange box that scales up to four sockets and the Power E980 big iron machine that scales up to 16 sockets. The IBM i platform is not available on the Power E950, so IBM i customers who need more than a two-socket Power9 machine to support their workloads have to make a jump to a single-node implementation of the Power E980.

  This is the same situation that customers faced during the Power8 era, so it is …

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• Syncsort Unveils MFA, Bolsters IBM i Security Suites

  July 30, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort last week unveiled new security and auditing capabilities for its IBM i user base, including a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution dubbed the Cilasoft Reinforced Authentication Manager for IBM i, as well as new releases of the Cilasoft and Enforcive security suites.

  Developing and selling security software has become one of the focuses for Syncsort, the Pearl River, New York, company that previously concentrated on developing mainframe data integration solutions and extract, transfer, and load (ETL) technology for distributed Hadoop clusters.

  Since it merged with IBM i high availability vendor Vision Solutions last year, Syncsort has acquired several …

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• The Frustration Of Not Knowing How We Are Doing

  July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The old adage from management guru Peter Drucker is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and it is something that organizations take to heart to run themselves. There is such a thing as taking this all too far, where you spend all your time measuring and managing and not enough time getting actual stuff done, and then there is not having enough information to actually manage well.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public companies, does not, to my knowledge, have explicit guidelines as to how companies report their product and divisional categories. And thus, with each …

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• Removing The Last Governor: Core Software Pricing

  July 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This being near the July 4th holiday in America, which is a significant time for me and my life with The Four Hundred, I am going to ask your indulgence and tell you a story or two.

  When I first moved to New York City way back in December 1988, it was not the first time that I had encountered a recession. But it was an important one that changed my life and, I like to think, yours.

  My parents were the grandchildren of farmers, and their parents worked in the factories of upstate rural New Jersey – there …

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• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

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• IT Spending To Boom In 2018, Tails Off In 2019

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is the cart and what is the horse in the elements that make up an economy. Our sense of how well or poorly the economy is doing actually affects how we react and therefore how we actually spend on goods and services, and therefore there is always an element of self-fulfilling prophecy mixed in with the underlying fundamentals. It is hard to predict what an economy is going to do, much less 185 different ones that are interconnected on planet Earth, and it is even harder, perhaps, to reckon what one aspect of those …

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• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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• As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow

  June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.

  This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …

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• Winning The Platform War With IBM i

  June 13, 2018 Alex Woodie

  How much influence does the selection of a computer system have on a given company’s success? What about the success of all the companies that use that platform? Those are tough question, to be sure, and probably ones that graduate students could ponder on their way to getting an MBA. But according to IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will, who has a first-row seat to the platform wars, the proof of IBM i’s success is in the pudding.

  If you’re like most IBM i professionals, you get a little defensive when plans are made to migrate off the platform. You …

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• UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management

  June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.

  Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …

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