• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 3

  January 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Due to an unprecedented response from the community, we are running a third installment of 2022 predictions. The third (and final) round of predictions kicks off with an optimistic prophecy from Charles Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems, who has a very bright outlook for the year ahead in IBM i land.

  “As business confidence and optimism rallies, IT budgets will become less restrained,” Guarino tells IT Jungle. “Even those with the least maintained and enhanced legacy systems will experience modernization pressure. This will come from all sources, internal, external and industry compliance, all demanding swift …

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• Recent IBM i Redbook Roundup

  January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Say what you will about IBM, but it puts out a lot of technical information compared to its peers in the systems business, and always has. The techies at Big Blue and its many business partners expend a great deal of effort to put good technical information about Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform out there to help people better understand, run, and manage their applications and systems.

  It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we perused the IBM Redbook library on your behalf and now present to you a roundup of the most …

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• IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database

  January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.

  The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …

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• The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.

  There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …

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• IBM i Community Predictions For 2022, Part 1

  January 10, 2022 Alex Woodie

  While the month and year ostensibly are just values in the date field, when the calendar flips over from December to January, things feel different. There’s a greater sense of hope and optimism for what the new year will bring. Coming off another calamitous year filled with COVID-19, perhaps it’s we need that even more so this year.

  It has become an IT Jungle tradition to ask members of the IBM i community at the start of the year for their predictions. This year is no different, and so we’ll kick off the first part of our (most likely) two-part …

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• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December. and since nothing much else is going on, let’s take a quick waltz through the IT Jungle archives to see what kind of year it was. It all started back in January, when…

  Our esteemed founding editor tried to convince IBM what is plainly obvious: That the IBM i installed base is “still its very largest enterprise computing customer base” (emphasis added). Yes, there are more Red Hat licenses, but when it comes to unique companies, IBM i, with around 120,000 customers around the world, is still tops. Will IBM do the hard work to find a (virtualized) …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.

  These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …

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• A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.

  The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …

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