• What Big Blue’s HashiCorp Buy Might Mean For The IBM i Platform

  May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a riddle for you, or even two. Why did IBM buy systems software maker HashiCorp for $6.4 billion? And what on Earth, if anything, will this mean for IBM i customers, or even Power Systems customers in general?

  If you want to get a deeper background into HashiCorp, check out the Related Stories link at the bottom of this story for the detailed analysis I have done on the company over at The Next Platform. In the meantime, a short overview of HashiCorp and its tools is in order.

  Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, the co-founders of …

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• Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

  January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

  Take that in for a second. Savor it.

  Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …

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• Big Blue’s New “WebSpheres” To Surf The Container And AI Waves

  July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, there is a lot of money that can be made on AI training and inference, as is aptly shown by the financial results of Nvidia. That company, which is the darling of Wall Street these days, has gone from datacenter wannabe to datacenter giant in the course of a decade and a half. It has been fascinating to watch, but it is as much the result of lucky timing as hard work, as Jensen Huang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, admitted from the beginning.

  Nvidia has been working on parallel computing architectures for accelerating HPC workloads …

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• Tweaks To The Power Software Stack, And Red Hat Gets Easier

  April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system, its database, and the related systems and development tools for IBM i, you can bet Elon Musk’s last dollar that there will also be nips and tucks, and sometimes more significant changes, to the adjunct software that runs on Power Systems iron. Such as the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the PowerSC security tools, and other things.

  And indeed, as part of the April 11 announcements, IBM has tweaked this Power Systems stuff. This is not one of the big ones, as …

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• IBM and Microsoft Bring .NET to Power, After All

  November 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Despite initially denying the existence of a project to bring the Microsoft .NET runtime to Power, IBM this week officially announced that .NET version 7 will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power. The technology becomes available immediately, although the database driver connecting .NET applications to Db2 for i will take more time.

  Over the years, there have been various attempts at getting the .NET runtime unhooked from its Windows roots and replanted on the Power platform, including some targeting the IBM i operating system. In 2011, a big step forward was made with the Mono Project, which …

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• Power Systems Revenues Look To Grow In 2022

  October 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It was a pretty good third quarter for Big Blue on many fronts if you overlook a $5.76 billion writedown as it has transferred some of its pension obligations for retired employees to a third party to get them off its books forever. This is the second straight quarter that, ignoring this massive hit to the books, which was actually offset by some tax benefits IBM cashed in at the same time, the company has shown both revenue and profit growth.

  This may not be the IBM of our salad days, but it is a far cry better from the …

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• The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.

  There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …

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• Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10

  November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.

  With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …

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• The Shape Of The IBM To Come

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is getting ready to spin off its managed services businesses, which represents about a third of its revenue stream and a big chunk of its employee base, into the separate company called Kyndryl and hopes to have this task done by the end of the year. Last week, IBM’s top brass had a virtual meeting with Wall Street to host its Investor Day, and IBM’s chief executive officer, Arvind Krishna, and the rest of the team unveiled a new segment and financial reporting structure that will be put into effect once the Kyndryl spinout is done.

  At that …

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• In Search of Multi-Modal Data Integration

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the number of data sources that companies use goes up, so too does the complexity of the data pipelines that bring it all together. Instead of using a mix of different tools and technologies for ETL, ELT, and batch integration, some users are seeking a single multi-modal data integration tool that can deliver multiple integration approaches.

  One company providing multi-modal data integration is Equalum. The company’s DataOps offering works in various methodologies, including capturing real-time database updates using change data capture (CDC) technology; batch-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) and ELT; and REST- and SOAP-based data integration using …

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