• At Long Last, IBM i Finally Gets Power9

  February 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The most important part of the Power9 rollout for the vast majority of IBM i customers has finally happened: Big Blue has lifted the veil on the Power9-based “ZZ” systems that we have been hearing about for a few months now and that are being delivered in the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 servers.

  These are three of the six machines based on the ZZ design, and they are the only ones that can IBM i without any restrictions. Two other machines, which are called the Power H922 and Power H924, were created explicitly to run SAP’s HANA …

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• LUG Talks About IBM i Priorities

  January 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The Large User Group (LUG) held its first meeting of the year last week at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota. While LUG members use the IBM i platform differently than your average mid-sized company, their experiences, concerns, and vision for the future of the platform are relevant to the community as a whole. We caught up with two LUG members last week to get the low down on the i tech.

  The LUG is a private organization that keeps the identities of its members confidential. Because the overall IBM i ecosystem is relatively small, the LUG requested that IT …

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• LightEdge Shops A “True Cloud” To IBM i Users

  January 29, 2018 Dan Burger

  IBM i-based cloud computing is not your average everyday IBM i environment. And it’s different from managed services that are sometimes called hosted services. True cloud – a term that’s being used to describe virtualized computing, storage, and networking available with utility-style flexible pricing – is still a rare sight with IBM i. But Roger Mellman knows where you can find one. He built it for LightEdge Solutions, a services provider with an edge on the typical managed service provider.

  IBM first approached LightEdge five years ago about building an IBM i-based cloud, Mellman, the director of enterprise …

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• IBM Winds Down Yet More Older Power Systems Features

  January 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is amazing to me that IBM stops selling specific Power Systems and features in such a gradual and what looks like a haphazard fashion. It seems to take forever to kill off older product lines. It may be more a function of what supplies Big Blue has in the barn than with some kind of orderly, sensible withdrawal from marketing of prior generations of gear.

  The upshot is that it is very hard to figure out what IBM is and is not selling, and when it will stop selling particular features. And because IBM does not usually provide the …

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• Update On The Spectre And Meltdown Patches For Power

  January 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes to the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities that hit as the new year was getting going, the important word to ponder is “mitigated.” Everyone is talking about mitigating the issue, but no one is using the word “fixed.” As we discussed last week, one of the two types of Spectre vulnerabilities – the Variant 2 known as branch target injection – is particularly tricky to hack and to fix, so IT vendors are choosing their words very carefully.

  The odds were that unintended consequences for such a low-level fix will occur, so you can …

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• Power Systems And The Spectre And Meltdown Threats

  January 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Speculative execution is something that has been part of modern processors for well over a decade, and while it is hard to quantify how much of a performance benefit this collection of techniques have delivered, it is obviously significant enough that all CPUs, including IBM Power and System z chips, have them. And that, as the new Spectre and Meltdown security holes that were announced by Google on January 3 show, turns out to be a big problem.

  Without getting too deep into the technical details, there are many different ways to implement speculative execution, which is used to …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• The AS/400 Lessons Come Back Around With Power9 Systems

  December 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years before I took the job as Systems Editor at The Register and in the years since I left that post, the joke about any new system or device was: “Yes, but can it run Crysis?” Those of us writing stories would bend a few sentences around the idea, particularly with Linux systems, which if you equipped them with the WINE Windows emulator might allow said device to indeed run that first-person shooter game that was popular from 2007 through 2013.

  As we think about the new “Witherspoon” Power9 server that IBM launched last week, we can’t help …

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• The Tipping Point For Power9

  December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market is booming as 2017 comes to a close, and IBM is looking to try to catch the tailwind and lift its Power Systems business from the doldrums and get it rising again on the IBM i, AIX, and Linux fronts. The word on the street is that the first commercial Power9 machines, the ones aimed at HPC and AI workloads, will ship sometime before the end of the year, with a fairly quick ramp of Power9 systems for more generic workloads.

  It can’t come a moment too soon, and while we wish IBM had started shipping Power9 …

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• Counting The Cost

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are strong believers in being thorough with both the technical and economic analysis of platforms. In the absence of a lot of performance and pricing information on Power Systems iron, we are always looking for ways to help IBM i shops try to figure out what to do when they are thinking about upgrading a machine or just tossing out the old one and buying a new one.

  IBM isn’t shipping Power9-based machines that can support IBM i as yet, and it is not expected to do so until early next year. But in the meantime, Big Blue wants …

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