• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

  November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

  First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

  When …

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• Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates

  October 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.

  In announcement letter 222-279, we find the usual agglomeration of updates to the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the virtual Hardware Management Console, and the Cloud Management Console.

  With PowerVM, IBM wanted to …

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• Integrated Does Not Have To Mean Included And Invoiced

  October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this era of “pay for what you eat” cloud computing – maybe they should have called it “buffet computing” after all because there sure as hell is nothing cloudy about the bill when it comes – it seems odd that customers can’t pick a la carte the things they want and they don’t want in a system that nonetheless has all of its myriad components and services integrated.

  Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated, with one throat to choke (for the most part) when things go wrong. We are strong believers in …

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• 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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