• Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.

  As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …

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• IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.

  IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …

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• Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.

  The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …

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• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

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• IBM i Software And Power Systems Upgrades Keep Rolling Forward

  January 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  During tough economic times, I am fond of reminding people – and especially myself as I try to remain calm in a recession or whatever the heck this is we are dealing with now during the coronavirus pandemic – that business, in the aggregate, never goes to zero. No matter how bad it gets, thus far in the modern era starting perhaps with the Renaissance and maybe even longer but certainly since the agricultural and industrial revolutions in the 1700s, people still need stuff and they need people to grow or make it.

  That doesn’t mean it is easy, however. …

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• Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride

  January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.

  It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …

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• Some Confusion Around IBM i 7.1 And IBM i 7.2 Support

  December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of writing last week’s discussion about how Big Blue would be supporting the IBM i operating system, database, and systems software stack out to 2032 and beyond, I discovered some anomalies in the documentation that IBM has put out regarding extended support for specific IBM i releases.

  For many customers, getting beyond IBM i 7.1 is impossible for various reasons, which we have discussed in the past. Some of the reasons are technical – customers have lost their source code and they can’t tweak it to run on more modern releases of hardware and software, or their …

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• Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter

  December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.

  We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …

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• To 2032 . . . And Beyond!

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …

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• Resilience In The Platform, Resilience In The Business

  November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic is making it clear just how dependent much of the global economy is on mobility, entertainment, travel, and hospitality. But it is also making it clear that many parts of the economy, thanks to IT infrastructure, are resilient and are coping with the stresses and strains.

  “The need to rapidly innovate has clearly become apparent,” Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, explained in his keynote at the recent Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event. “And we will continue to do that for AIX, IBM i and Linux,” Sibley said, …

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