• AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?

  December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?

  AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …

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• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

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• A Proper Accounting Of The Power Business

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue might be preparing for the spinout of its Kyndryl managed services company, now slated for early November, and its new financial presentations, which we reviewed two weeks ago, but that task is not yet done and until it is we are still getting the same financial view of IBM in the third quarter of 2021 ended in June. It was not a particularly memorable quarter when it came to IBM Systems group.

  But it is looking like IBM is going to be able to pad a better 2022, with Kyndryl taking on a huge amount of software …

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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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• IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

  May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

  That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …

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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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• IBM i Wish List: Add A Virtual IBM i Platform Like System z Wazi

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Serendipity is a funny thing; part serene and part dippy, I suppose. I was poking around for something interesting that might be relevant to the IBM i platform, and ran across announcement letter 221-122, which was for something called IBM Wazi Developer  for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. I had recently heard of CodeReady Workspaces because of the recent Power Systems announcements, but I had no idea what Wazi was.

  What I now know is that I want this in an IBM i flavor.

  There is no such thing as a portable and cheap and ubiquitous System z mainframe environment, …

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• We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

  March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …

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• Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.

  It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …

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• Rocket Rebrands, Updates, and Discounts Terminal Emulator

  January 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Greenscreen interfaces may not look pretty, but they continue to be effective and people continue to use them. That longevity among IBM i and System Z shops is a big reason why Rocket Software last week decided to rebrand its BlueZone offering as the Rocket Terminal Emulator. Rocket is trying to drum up interest in the new software, which also supports the latest security protocols, by offering a steep discount on license and subscription fees, but only for a limited time.

  BlueZone, which Rocket Software obtained with its 2006 acquisition of Seagull Software, has been the go-to product for …

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