RISC Archives - IT Jungle

IBM i at 35: A Walk Down Memory Lane

April 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

You may have heard that the IBM midrange platform is turning 35 this year. IBM has a number of events planned in honor of that milestone, culminating with a big birthday bash on June 21. IBM execs gave us a sneak peak of the festivities to come at this week’s POWERUp show in Denver, as well as a technical look back at exactly how we got here.

The day the AS/400 launched in 1988 was notable for several reasons. IBM i CTO Steve Will, who was just starting his distinguished engineering career at IBM, recalls lots of excitement in the …
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The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

A lot more than you probably think, as it …
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Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360

July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.

Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …
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A Cornucopia Of Compute

May 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Ever since the advent of file servers in the 1980s, the rise of client/server system architectures in the early 1990s, and the commercialization of Internet networking in the middle 1990s, AS/400 shops and those using the progeny of that venerable IBM midrange computer have had hybrid computing platforms in the datacenter. Meaning, a mix of processor architectures and operating systems other than OS/400 or IBM i that was in some fashion associated with or actually doing mission critical work.

In fact, as you all well know, there is in aggregate more raw compute in the X86 or RISC servers that …
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It’s Harder To Hear The Pulse In The Server Market

March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

More than any other piece of equipment that does into the datacenter, the server is an indicator of health and wealth. Over the more than three decades that The Four Hundred has been published, we have spent a lot of effort and time to understand how the world is investing in what kinds of servers, including Big Blue’s midrange systems running OS/400 and IBM i, and how the trends change over time. And we are committed to doing that going forward, even though it has just gotten a little bit more difficult.

For the past several decades – I honestly …
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The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …
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IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …
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Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes

March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …
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Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …
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