• 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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• Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a truth in this world that you get what you pay for, and it is absolutely true for the systems that companies buy to support SAP’s HANA in-memory database and their applications for data warehousing and online transaction processing.

  It is no secret to the Power Systems faithful that IBM’s Power architecture has consistently offered reliability, availability, and serviceability features in both the processor and the system architecture that are superior to X86 alternatives. And the Power Systems platform also offers superior compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth benefits on top of that, which absolutely justifies the …

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• IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

  When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …

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• Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

  The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

  The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 47

  November 23, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  As we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, there is a new security bulletin that has been issued relating to a speculative execution vulnerability that affects Power9 systems running the Virtual I/O Server in general and AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2 in particular. As such, it indirectly affects all four IBM i releases, from 7.1 through 7.4. See Security Bulletin: Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788 at this link.

  The patches to deal with this vulnerability are as follows:

  • IBM i 7.4: MF68089 and MF68090
  • IBM i 7.3: MF68094 and MF68095
  • IBM i 7.2: MF68096 and MF68097
  • IBM i

  …

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• Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get surprises very often in the Power Systems market, and even fewer in the IBM i sub-market. But last week, we did get a surprise – and it was a pleasant one – as Big Blue decided that it was going to allow for IBM i 7.1, which has long since been removed from marketing and which was just recently given extended extended support through April 2023, to run on selected models of the Power Systems line using Power9 processors.

  That IBM would allow for this is remarkable, and it shows the economic and technical difficulties that many …

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