• Retranslation Could Boost Performance

  May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.

  One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …

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• Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i

  May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.

  As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …

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• Deep Dive On IBM i 7.4 And IBM i 7.3 TR6 Hardware Limits

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As everybody knows by now, IBM has announced both the Technology Refresh 6 for IBM i 7.3 and the shiny new IBM i 7.4 release. We did a brief overview of these operating system releases in last Wednesday’s issue, concurrent with the launch and ahead of their respective May 10 and June 21 general availability dates, to put them into perspective. Now, it is time to get into the nuts and bolts and bits and bytes of what Big Blue has announced.

  Rather than try to do it all in one story or possibly two, we are breaking it …

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• Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

  As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …

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• Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future.

  There are many …

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• Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

  These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …

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• What Vintage Is Your IBM i Wine?

  April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long time since we have seen a new version of the IBM i operating system, but if history is any guide, we are on the cusp of yet another release of the platform. And thanks to the way Big Blue handles updates to the software, through its Technology Refresh incremental upgrade process, this will not be as dramatic an event as updating the operating system, middleware, database, and application development tools in the stack has been throughout most of the history of the IBM midrange.

  But there are plenty of OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …

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• Rebuilding The Bottom Of The Pyramid

  March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how Big Blue had extended the life of the Power8-based entry Power S812 Mini, announced on Valentine’s Day last year specifically to give entry IBM i shops a cheaper alternative than buying the Power S814 or Power S824. It seems to me that IBM needs to do some rejiggering of the way it bundles and prices this entry machine to get the installed base of customers using vintage hardware and operating systems to get current and stay there.

  We are under the impression that the number …

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• Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.

  We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …

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• Tweaking Systems And Withdrawal Symptoms

  March 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A system product line does not always come out finished and complete, all at once, and its retirement from the sales catalog and the field is not always a simple and smooth thing, either. After a certain amount of criticism from its largest customers, Big Blue last year decided that it would get a little bit more orderly about the latter, as machines are withdrawn from marketing and eventually support. As for the former, well, there are always some nips and tucks that are done here and there as parts of the system are tweaked to meet specific customer demands. …

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