• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 9

  March 4, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  IBM i 7.2 has been superseded a long time ago, but there is still a lot of it in the Power Systems installed base and Big Blue is still making updates to it for those customers who are stuck on the 7.2 release and who are stuck paying for extended support, which is very expensive. To that end, there is a new 720 Group HIPER, level 242, rolled up in PTF patch SF99719, which you can read about here.

  There are also two new security vulnerabilities for the IBM i stack.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application …

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• The Cloud Is Part Of The IBM i Present, And A Bigger Part Of Its Future

  February 26, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As obvious as this might sound in hindsight, if you want to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions in the first place. And as inquisitive communicators, we will be the first ones to admit that this is not always as easy as it sounds.

  It is hard to draw the line in the timeline sands for when the first true cloudy instance of a Power Systems machine running a rentable license to the IBM i operating system was announced, but it is safe to say that various hosting providers have been renting out parts of …

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• The Power Of Community At LISUG

  February 26, 2024 Steven Wolk

  Running an IBM i user group is hard work these days, but the team at the Long Island Systems User Group makes it look easy. Despite having seen their sister groups in New York and Connecticut fold and cease operations since COVID, LISUG not only stands as the last remaining group in the tri-state area – that is New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut – but has been growing and there’s no shortage of exciting initiatives underway.

  What’s their secret? It’s the same basic formula, with a few twists – but it all starts with showcasing top quality speakers. In …

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• Lots Of Unanswered Questions On IBM i Subscriptions

  February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like all of you, we have been watching with great interest as Big Blue transitions the IBM i software stack and Power10 hardware to cloud-like, utility-style subscription pricing. We have watched how each part of the IBM i stack has been transformed from the perpetual (and sometimes user) license pricing scheme with Software Maintenance to a subscription.

  As far as we know, and as we reported back in September 2023 when the subscription pricing for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was revealed, March 26, 2024, is supposed to be the last day you will be able to …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems

  February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.

  In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.

  So it is with the decade long …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems

  February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …

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• Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

  Take that in for a second. Savor it.

  Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …

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• The IBM i Base Is Ready To Keep Investing In The Future

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are at the beginning of a new year, and of course that means that it was time for us to participate in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, which is sponsored by Fortra and which is now in its 10th year. We enjoy the webinar that Forta hosts to have a bunch of people from IBM and myself riff on what the survey results mean – and what they don’t mean.

  Our host on the webinar was Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, and we were joined by Douglas Gibbs and Dan Sundt, who …

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• New IBM Champion Class Grows Nearly 40 Percent

  January 29, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a new crop of IBM Champions this month, and the first thing that stands out is the size of the 2024 IBM Champions class. Big Blue gave the honor to 1,155 individuals this year, a 38 percent increase over last year. Just about everyone who applied was named an IBM Champion, says Libby Ingrassia, the IBM program director, who also noted there was considerable overlap between IBM Champions and the new IBM Rising Champion Advocacy badge program.

  IBM launched its IBM Champions program back in 2008 as a way to boost the visibility of customers and business partners …

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• End Of Support Announced For IBM Power Middleware Releases

  January 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last year, Big Blue moved its current and archived announcement letters as well as its sales manuals and other systems such as PRPQ tracking from the ancient IBMLink system (which used to run on its own mainframes for the many decades that we have used it) to a new system called IBM Documentation. The latter of which may perhaps have a better look and feel, but which has a much more difficult way of trying to keep track of what IBM is doing on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

  The new IBM Documentation system does not allow you to …

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