• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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• The Case For Software-Based IBM i HA/DR

  July 25, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Software-based replication surfaced in the 1990s and continues to be a very popular choice for IBM i shops of all sizes, across an array of industry sectors. But what are the benefits of using software solutions versus hardware alternatives for HA/DR? There are a number of benefits that are an outgrowth of an HA/DR strategy that go beyond HA/DR and where the software approach is better than the hardware approach.

  The first one is business intelligence.

  Due to its reliability, powerful integration capabilities and ability to secure, many choose Power Systems running IBM i as their main database server or …

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• IBM Launches Ansible On Power Solution

  February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week officially announced the Ansible Automation Platform is available for Power servers. The offering brings certified endpoint collection modules for IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power.

  Ansible was originally developed to be a lightweight and reliable configuration management system for servers, applications, networks, containers, security, and the cloud. The software, which Red Hat acquired in 2015 (before Red Hat was subsequently snapped up by IBM), was designed to model customers’ IT infrastructure and manage it with an agentless approach.

  The primary interface that administrators use to define actions with Ansible are playbooks based on YAML files. …

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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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• Cloud Walkers Updates IBM i Partition Manager, Slashes Prices

  November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All over the world, a lot of things are taking a bit longer to get done these days thanks to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But things are still getting done, and that is the main thing. So it is with Bartlomiej Grabowski, the founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Walkers, the startup based in Prague in the Czech Republic who released a tool called LPARKit, which we covered at its V1 release back in December 2019.

  The plan, Grabowski tells The Four Hundred, was to take all of the input from the V1 users …

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• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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• Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.

  They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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