• More Price Hikes From IBM, Now For High End Storage

  May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases at IBM just keep coming as the company passes on higher component costs, and very likely higher manufacturing and support costs, that it is experiencing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic on to customers. Now we are seeing higher prices on high-end external storage.

  We have covered a number of IBM’s recent price hikes in the past several weeks, which you can see in the Related Stories section at the end of this report. But to characterize them briefly to put the new price increases into context, we have seen inflation in the prices for certain Power9 and …

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• There Were Actually More Power Systems Price Hikes Than We Thought

  April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we told you about two price hikes on Power Systems hardware, software, and services that were announced on April 13 and take effect for hardware and software on May 7 and for selected Software Maintenances services on July 1.

  One of the price changes came in our announcement letter roundup and the other came through the business partner network, and on a hunch on Sunday night with another story still needing to be written, I logged into the IBM announcement letter system to see if anything had happened while I was away last week sitting in the sun …

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• Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices

  April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.

  With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …

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• IBM i RFE Site Moving to New Location

  April 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month announced that it’s moving its Request for Enhancements (RFE) program to a new place. From now on, IBM i users will be asked to submit and vote on RFEs via its new IBM Ideas website, where IBM is centralizing the RFE programs for various products, including IBM i.

  In the summer of 2016, IBM opened a new RFE program on its developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/. That website marked Big Blue’s first formalization of its requirements process, which up until that point was spread across four entities: the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC), COMMON Europe Advisory …

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• IBM i High Availability: A Met Need?

  March 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Data from the IBM i Marketplace Survey suggests an interesting phenomenon may be playing out when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery: As the usage of HA solutions goes up, the percentage of users expressing concerns about HA and DR goes down.

  After peaking at 66 percent in HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2020, the percentage of IBM i users declaring high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) a concern has dropped each of the past two years. For the 2022 survey, which was released last month, only 59 percent of survey participants declared HA/DR to be a …

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• Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.

  To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.

  The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …

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• No Plan To Support New Nav on Older IBM i Releases, IBM Says

  January 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has no plans to support the new version of Navigator for i (i.e., “New Nav”) with older releases of the operating system, despite the existence of the severe Log4j security flaw in the heritage version of Navigator (“Old Nav”). The early, unexpected death of Old Nav also will hasten the adoption of New Nav for customers on current releases, and New Nav will become the default version with an update in March, IBM says.

  Earlier this month, IBM announced that no security patches would be forthcoming for Old Nav, which uses the Log4j code at the heart of a …

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• Log4j Hits Heritage Version of Navigator for i – No Patch Coming

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops running the old version of the Navigator for i client should be aware that the software is vulnerable to the Log4j security vulnerability, and there will be no patch to fix it, IBM says in a new security bulletin. There will, however, be fixes coming to other vulnerable components, including IWS, IAS, and IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), IBM says.

  Just before we hit the holiday break, the extremely severe Apache Log4j security vulnerability was disclosed to the world, resulting in a frantic effort to patch servers, desktops, refrigerators – just about anything with a …

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• Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort

  July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.

  Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …

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• What’s New With BRMS, PowerHA, And Db2 Mirror

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The latest IBM i Technology Refreshes (TRs) brought a number of enhancements to various parts of the operating system and related licensed products. That includes new stuff for its backup and recovery product, BRMS, as well as the two high availability offerings, PowerHA and Db2 Mirror.

  On the Backup and Recovery Media Services (BRMS) front, IBM added several new features with IBM i 7.4 TR4 and IBM i 7.3 TR10, including new SQL services that returns log information for BRMS activities. This new SQL service generates the same information that the Display Log for BRM (DSPLOGBRM) command does, but it …

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