• Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O

  October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.

  Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:

  “IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …

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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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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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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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• LUG Looks to Grow Membership

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you work at a large IBM i shop and are interested in having more of a say in the direction of the platform, then you might be interested in joining the influential Large User Group (LUG). And as luck would have it, the group, which is meeting in Rochester next week for the first time in three years, has several openings in its rolls and is looking for new members.

  LUG got its start back in 1994, when IT executives from six big AS/400 shops got together at a COMMON conference and realized they had a common set of …

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• Log4j Hits Heritage Version of Navigator for i – No Patch Coming

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops running the old version of the Navigator for i client should be aware that the software is vulnerable to the Log4j security vulnerability, and there will be no patch to fix it, IBM says in a new security bulletin. There will, however, be fixes coming to other vulnerable components, including IWS, IAS, and IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), IBM says.

  Just before we hit the holiday break, the extremely severe Apache Log4j security vulnerability was disclosed to the world, resulting in a frantic effort to patch servers, desktops, refrigerators – just about anything with a …

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• Guru: Physical System Performance

  November 15, 2021 Dawn May

  Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …

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• Systems Software Stack Gets A Refresh With Power10

  September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When there is new server hardware, the systems software stack needs to be tweaked to support it and to take better advantage of it. And that is also a perfect time to add new features to the systems software that can be supported on older iron. (But not too old or customers will never move forward. . . . )

  And so it is with the various core systems software – PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerSC, and the HMC – that runs atop Power Systems machinery and either alongside of or underneath the IBM i operating system and the IBM i Technology …

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