• How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

  May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

  What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Chilli IT

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many strengths in the IBM i platform besides its hardware and software architecture or the sophistication and ease of programming embodied in its development tools. The diversity of its partner ecosystem is another strength.

  As we pointed out last March with the launch of our ongoing In The IBM i Trenches series, globally there are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, as well as thousands of suppliers of third party maintenance, of technical support, of programming and system management services, and now of hosting and cloud computing. We want to get …

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• HCI Is The Dominant Converged System, Probably For Good

  April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back in the dawn of time, all systems were “converged,” meaning that their compute, storage, and networking were embodied in their totality within the same system. These functions were pulled apart and a slew of best-of-breed server, switch, and storage appliances were created and they could be mixed and matched in myriad ways. Some might say in too many ways for the vast majority of IT shops, who don’t have the luxury of bales of money laying around to attract PhDs in computer science.

  As distributed computing really took hold in the 1990s, but the 2000s it was clear …

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• SolarWinds Hack Raises Concern for IBM i Shops

  January 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The recently disclosed hack of the SolarWinds log management software enabled bad actors to gain access to the protected networks of numerous government agencies and private companies. It is also impacting an untold number of IBM i shops, which use SolarWinds software in not-insignificant numbers.

  In early December, Reuters broke the story of a massive and sophisticated breach of federal government computer systems that started in March 2020. According to the stories, state-backed cybercriminals exploited security flaws in at least three software vendors, including SolarWinds, Microsoft Azure, and VMware, to access private information in the target systems, …

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• From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.

  But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Red Hat Linux

  November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support.

  Just as a recap from last week’s …

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• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

  This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …

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• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …

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• Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i

  May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.

  As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …

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