• 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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• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

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• Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10

  November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.

  With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …

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• A Proper Accounting Of The Power Business

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue might be preparing for the spinout of its Kyndryl managed services company, now slated for early November, and its new financial presentations, which we reviewed two weeks ago, but that task is not yet done and until it is we are still getting the same financial view of IBM in the third quarter of 2021 ended in June. It was not a particularly memorable quarter when it came to IBM Systems group.

  But it is looking like IBM is going to be able to pad a better 2022, with Kyndryl taking on a huge amount of software …

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• Talking Power Systems Deals With The Boss

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What a relief when you speak the same language with someone in the business. In any business. But particularly with someone in the AS/400 and IBM i business, who has been at it about the same time as you, has seen the same stuff as you, has the same frames of reference as you, and who knows what the hell you are talking about even if they don’t agree with you all the time.

  That’s how it is with the boss at UCG Technologies, that being president and founder Jim Kandrac, who is proud of his city of Cleveland and …

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• Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

  But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

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