• PowerVM, vHMC, HMC, And Cloud Management Console Get Their Tweaks

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever the system hardware is updated, the virtualization and control plane software for that system also has to be tweaked, and we are finally getting around to covering some of improvements and changes that Big Blue has put into the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the HMC and vHMC management consoles, and the Cloud Management Console that were part of the July 12 Power10 entry and midrange system announcements.

  In announcement letter 222-191, we get the hardware tweaks to the stacks mentioned above, and in announcement letter 122-053. There are not earth-shattering updates, mind you. (Why do we want …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1022s

  July 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is second part of our in-depth coverage of the entry and midrange Power10 machines that Big Blue launched on July 12, and today we are going to take a look at the Power 1022s, a new class of machine in the Power Systems lineup that shoots the gap between the lowest-end Power S1014, which we reviewed last week, and the Power S1022 and Power L1022 that offer more expandability and more features.

  We will cover these machines next week, followed by the Power S1024 and Power L1024 the week after that, and finish off with the Power E1050 – …

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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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• Getting A Firm Handle On Power Systems And Storage Firmware

  June 15, 2022 Richard Warren

  Back in the old days of the AS/400 and the iSeries, most customers had a single box or maybe two, one for production applications and databases and one for development of high availability. And everything that box needed was inside of itself.

  And at most, you applied two kinds of PTFs – those for the operating system and those for the microcode – to the machine, and you did that maybe once or twice a year and every once in a while you might add some group PTFs to update security or other important features.

  But the world has changed …

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• How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

  What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 Drives AIOps Into License Management

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced an expansion of its partnership with Flexera that will see IBM’s AIOps solutions integrated with Flexera’s software asset management software. The integration will give customers more insight into customers’ software licensing and SaaS subscription entitlements, from the cloud all the way to Power servers and mainframes, IBM says.

  The new integration specially targets IBM’s Turbonomic application resource management (ARM) software and the Flexera One offering from Flexera. According to Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM Automation, the integration will close the gap that existed between what software and SaaS solutions customers are entitled to …

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