• Massiello Named First Lifetime Champion for Power

  May 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Pete Massiello has been a mainstay of the IBM i community for decades. He’s the president of iTech Solutions, a former president at COMMON, a respected technical authority on the platform, an in-demand speaker, and part of the inaugural group of IBM Champions for Power Systems in 2011. Now he can add one more title to his resume: Lifetime Champion for Power Systems.

  IBM this month announced that Massiello is the first Lifetime Champion for Power, an event for which he was not prepared. “It was a surprise to me,” he said, before quickly adding “It’s a huge honor, an …

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• Inside IBM’s SAP HANA On Power Playbook

  May 21, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line is in transition right now, making the jump from Power8 to Power9 processors, and yet the company wants to continue selling applications without having customers wait for the newer chip to be available across the entire Power Systems portfolio. This is a particular problem when it comes to the HANA in-memory database on Power Systems, which IBM is eager to sell given the higher memory capacity and bandwidth that Power9 offers compared to the Xeon processors from Intel.

  To help business partners that are peddling SAP suites on Power, which includes the IBM i platform, in …

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• Getting Hyper And Converged With IBM i

  May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The hallmark of the System/38 and its progeny, the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms, is that these machines came fully integrated with all of the operating system, database, management, and development tools necessary to run a modern business. Integrated did not mean that these pieces were all sold as a single bundle, mind you, but they snapped together with good fit and finish and allowed companies to not have to become masters of the system code and could therefore be craftsman for the application code that actually ran the business.

  The AS/400 really set the pace for …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals To Boost Power System Sales

  May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A lot of the revenue that comes to the Power Systems division – and perhaps the bulk of it if history and the changed nature of the product line is any guide – comes from relatively big iron machines, at least by IBM i standards for what is little, middle, and big iron. And IBM needs to do something here in early 2018 to keep customers of big iron boxes investing while it prepares to ship machines with four sockets or more of the Power9 processors under a schedule that we told you about back in February and that seems …

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• Power Systems Posts Growth In The First Quarter

  April 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for four long years for the Power9 ramp to begin in earnest, and the merest hint of it happened Big Blue finished off its first quarter. That was when the “ZZ” Power9 entry systems announced back in February finally started shipping and IBM finally started booking some revenue for this new iron.

  IBM did not provide much in the way of information about the Power9 system sales in the first quarter ended in March, which was only a week and a half after the ZZ systems started shipping. Jim Cavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer for the …

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• IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i

  April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.

  On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …

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• Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.

  In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …

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• Insurer Chooses IBM i Database Re-Engineering Over Migration

  March 26, 2018 Dan Burger

  How do you want your database designed for the future and what problems have you created in the past that need to be fixed before you can think about the future? Old databases, originally designed for a business environment that has changed and continues to change, are not compatible. You may not be feeling any pain today and you may have no plans to change your business/IT alignment in the future, but much of the technology-driven business world is changing, which at some point will leave you alone on an island with a boat but no motor and no paddle. …

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• The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown

  March 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting to see what impact on performance the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution patches, which plug some security vulnerability holes that search engine giant Google discovered last summer and made public in early January, would have on Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system.

  Now that Big Blue has published the first edition of the Power Systems Performance Report that includes the new “ZZ” Power 9-based systems, we not only get a sense of the relative performance of the “Nimbus” Power9 chip for entry servers. We also can figure out the performance impact of the …

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• Drilling Down Into The New Power9 Entry Servers

  February 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Wednesday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you a high-level overview of the six new Power9 entry servers, code-named “ZZ” by IBM, as well as an initial pass on the changes that came with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. If you haven’t read these, please do, because they give you information on IBM’s strategy with regard to the Power9 iron and the IBM i platform.

  In this issue, we are going to drill down into the six new Power9 systems, taking particular care with the single-socket Power S914 and dual-socket Power …

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