• Cloud ERP for Less than $400 Per Month? Now There’s a Concept

  July 22, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What do you call a full-fledged ERP system running on a private IBM i cloud that costs less than $400 per month for three users? If you’re Software Concepts – the Massachusetts-based ERP vendor behind the bold new deal – you might call it just what the IBM i ecosystem needed.

  The IBM midrange server has always been something of an enigma in the IT business. Tucked between the giant mainframes running Fortune 100 outfits and the PCs favored by one-man shops, the AS/400 and its progeny have catered to midsized organizations that demand advanced business functionality, but not the …

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• How Big Blue Stacks Up IBM i On Premises And On Cloud

  June 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s the $64,000 question: How much more does a slice of the IBM Cloud running IBM i cost compared to buying an on-premises machine with the same rough amount of capacity and installing IBM i on it and putting it into production? The answer to that question is: That all depends. But in general, as is the case with all infrastructures available on premises and on the cloud, the cloud is always more expensive.

  This is not a surprise if you think about it for a moment. By using cloudy infrastructure, you are offloading the hassle of maintaining hardware and …

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• Why i Reason #87: Eschewing Performance for Its Own Sake

  May 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Make no mistake about it: IBM’s Power Systems server can flat out fly. The two biggest supercomputers on the planet right now – Summit and Sierra – are Power9 machines, although much of the computational oomph comes from Nvidia GPUs. But one thing that sets the IBM i server apart from its hardware compatriots is that it avoids the celebrity of performance.

  Performance is “in” right now in the IT space (it never really went out of style). Industry standard server makers (i.e., those who make X86 servers) fight over who has the fastest systems. Public cloud platforms battle to …

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• Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

  As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …

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• HelpSystems Nabs MPG for Performance Management

  August 27, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Performance Group, the Boulder, Colorado-based provider of capacity and performance management software for IBM i, is the latest software vendor to call it quits and join up with HelpSystems. It was HelpSystems first acquisition of the year and 20th since 2006.

  For decades, Midrange Performance Group, (MPG) has been one of the most trusted names when it comes to capacity planning and performance management for IBM i and the midrange servers that preceded it. If you want to know how your workload would run on a new Power Systems server from IBM, then you could find out using …

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