• Four Hundred Monitor, February 22

  February 22, 2017 Dan Burger

  A few weeks ago, Jesse Gorzinski was featured in an IT Jungle story. This week the IBM business architect of open source technologies shows up as the author of new blog called Open Your i. Open source can be really good for IBM i. And since we’re all accustomed to acronyms, OYi has a nice ring to it. We’ll be keeping an eye on Jesse.

  Monitor is also pointing to stories on cloud security mythology, IT budget advice for a bigger piece of the pie, testing your mental strength when taking on new projects, dialing into the top ten …

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• IBM Gives The Midrange A Valentine’s Day (Processor) Card

  February 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As expected, IBM rolled out a Valentine’s Day surprise for its IBM i and AIX customer bases with a new pair of machines aimed at giving a low powered, lower cost option for the customers running its legacy applications instead of Linux, which is the darling of the Power Systems business these days even though it does not come even close to representing the majority of the Power Systems revenue stream.

  The Power Mini or IBMini, as I have been calling the machine affectionately, turns out to be a variant of the existing single-socket Power S812 system that IBM has …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 15

  February 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  At the top of the top stories list this week is an article that imagines programming as the skilled labor that can revive the job market in the United States. It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to see that. Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing may obsolete some jobs, but Watson can’t out code a good coder.

  As long as we’re talking about cognitive, did you hear about the patents IBM collected this year directly related to cognitive computing? You couldn’t count them using all your fingers . . . even with 200 of your friends helping out …

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• More Insight Into The Rumored Power Mini System

  February 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM wanted to get customers to move ahead to new iron and the Moore’s Law increases in processing capacity meant that it needed to gear down boxes to bring customers forward, IBM actually did something about it and offered a cut-down machines with lower – and competitive – prices.

  Remember the AS/400 Model 150 machines launched two decades ago, and then the breakthrough “Invader” AS/400 Model 170 machines, using the “Apache” and then “Northstar” PowerPC processors that followed them in 1998 and 1999? These systems, in a very real sense, saved the AS/400 business. Back …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Next (And Maybe Last) Mainframe

  February 13, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  For the past several mainframe generations IBM has announced new large systems about every three years. The current line of big iron, the System z13, emerged in 2015, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone if the z14 or whatever it is called reaches customers next year, in 2018. Meanwhile, this year Ginni Rometty turns 60, IBM’s traditional CEO retirement age, and, like her predecessor, she could stick around one more year as the company’s chairman.

  The upshot: Rometty’s successor as CEO will enjoy the sales boost of a fresh mainframe product cycle. And if IBM is making money …

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• Debugging IBM’s New ‘Executive Guide’ For IBM i

  February 8, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Explaining the value of IBM i to a business executive is not an easy thing to do. Because so much of the computing world today runs on the Intel X86 architecture, many execs aren’t even aware there are alternatives. But there are, and the IBM i server, along with the System z mainframe, are among the last of a dying breed.

  IBM recently rolled out an online resource designed to help IBM i professionals explain this weird thing called IBM i. Weighing in at nearly 7,000 words, the IBM i Strategy and Roadmap attempts to lay out the basics of …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 8

  February 8, 2017 Dan Burger

  While IT Jungle is pretty thorough when it comes to covering the IBM i and Power Systems market as well as adjacent areas that will ultimately affect the IBM midrange community, we are not the only source of information out there.

  That was why we created Four Hundred Monitor so many years ago: to make you aware of all of the other relevant content out there on the Internet as well as to have a list of new resources and a calendar of events, all in one place. Now, Four Hundred Monitor is being incorporated into our flagship publication, The …

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• Geared Down, Low Cost Power IBM i Box Rumored

  February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been talking for a long time about the impedance mismatch between some IBM i shops in terms of what processing, memory, storage, and I/O capacity they need and what IBM delivers to them with each new generation of Power Systems iron. For many shops, even the smallest machine that Big Blue currently delivers is too much of a box.

  This is a testament to the efficiency of the IBM i platform and its integrated relational database management system in that it takes very little iron to get useful work. It also shows that for many customers, transaction processing …

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• Some Power Systems Tweaks And Sales Withdrawals

  February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We didn’t expect any major announcements from IBM’s Power Systems division here in the first couple of weeks of the year, but the company has made done a bunch of little things that might affect some IBM i shops that you ought to be aware of just the same.

  In announcement letter 117-013, which was put out on January 24, IBM made good on its promise to make the new I/O peripherals and memory cards that came out with the midrange Power 850C system announced last year available on the prior generation Power 850 box, which debuted in May …

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• 2017 IBM i Predictions: Take Three

  February 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In our third and final installment of our 2017 IBM i predictions series, we hear from several more IBM i professionals, including those from Profound Logic, Fresche, and Curbstone. We also hear from a prominent voice in the youth movement taking place in the IBM i community, as well as from the founder of the IBM i community’s newest local user group, MAGIC.

  Our first prediction comes from Stephanie Rabbani, a PHP expert who works at Alan Seiden Consulting. Rabbani has 14 years of developing on the IBM i platform and is involved in COMMON and other community …

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