• Entry And Midrange Power10 Machines Coming In July

  May 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If an IT supplier never gives a precise date for the launch of a product – and there are plenty of them that do not – then they can never be officially accused of shipping something late when the delivery date slips. But in the era of Coronavirus, all kinds of things are shipping later than expected and one of them is the entry Power Systems servers based on the Power10 processor. The other one is the midrange Power Systems machine based on the Power10.

  In a pre-briefing with Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering manager for Power Systems, …

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• 7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.

  The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

  April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

  But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …

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• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

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• Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.

  Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?

  In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

  March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

  In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …

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• IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.

  But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

  February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

  But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …

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• Talking IBM i Shop With New Power Systems GM Ken King

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every new general manager of the AS/400 division and its successors all the way up to the current Power Systems division – which hopefully is no longer called Cognitive Systems in the financials but nowhere else – inherits a unique configuration of that business in time and space and after one, two, or three years leaves it in another configuration.

  In all of our years of writing The Four Hundred, we have made an effort to get to know each and every one of them. Last July, ahead of the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business in November, …

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• Former Power Systems GM Joins FalconStor For IBM i Push

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Virtual tape library software provider FalconStor, which has been in the market for more than two decades, has tapped a former manager of IBM’s Power Systems division – namely Doug Balog, who ran Power Systems from 2013 through 2017 – as a strategic advisor as it begins a more aggressive push into the IBM i market.

  Balog is a familiar to long-time readers of The Four Hundred, of course. He ran System x server development at IBM from June 2004 through December 2009, significantly the BladeCenter converged blade server platform, then did a few years running IBM’s storage business, …

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