• Smart Modernization Is The Answer To IBM i Talent Shortage

  September 28, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  When we are at the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference a few months ago, we were amazed by the number of IT managers that approached us because of a shortage of IBM i programming talent. The dearth of programmers that are experienced with the business as well as legacy and modern programming techniques has pushed a lot of businesses up against the wall, with lost agility and in some cases delayed projects.

  As bad as that is, the situation could be worse. We have all heard the horror stories, where the executive suite or upper IT management push to switch away …

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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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• A Smorgasbord Of Power Systems Stuff

  September 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is usually pretty quiet on the IT front in the wake of the American Labor Day holiday, especially with a lot of European countries also having bank holidays around that time and many schools just starting back up again. Here in 2022, it is no different, although IBM did uncharacteristically launch the full subscription entry Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers on September 6.

  In any event, in the weeks surrounding the holiday, Big Blue did a bunch of stuff relating to the Power Systems platform and we want to tell you about it so you stay …

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• IBM’s Competitive Analysis For The Power10 Midrange Machine

  August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as there has been a Power architecture, way back in 1995 with the advent of the custom “Cobra Muskie” PowerPC AS chips, the rule of thumb for performance is that the Power core did twice the work of an Intel core designed for server workloads. This was true in 1993, when Intel jumped in the server racket with gusto, and it is true 31 years later as the entry and midrange Power10 machines in the same performance class as the top-end X86 iron from Intel and AMD are starting to ramp.

  This performance gap on cores is …

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• IBM’s Competitive Analysis For Power10 Entry Machines

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Long gone are the days when IBM, and indeed most other server vendors, clamored to run TPC-C, SAP SD, and SPEC JVM transaction processing benchmark tests on their new machines to prove they had the performance and they had the bang for the buck to compete in the broader market.

  To be fair, many of those tests had their flaws, allowing a certain amount of gaming of the benchmarks (as happened with the TPC-C and SPEC JVM tests) or not having official pricing attached to them (as happened with the SPEC JVM and SAP SD tests). Still, those benchmarks, as …

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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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• Managed Cloud Saves Money By Cutting System And People Overprovisioning

  June 22, 2022 Ron Venzin

  For most IBM i shops in the world, a unit of compute, storage, or networking on a cloud or a unit of time for a skilled IT specialist is always going to cost more than what it costs to have such talent in house. And so, you would think, putting an IBM i system in the cloud and managing all aspects of that system will always cost companies more money, right?

  Wrong.

  Here’s the part of the math that people rarely do, and that we do each time we close another cloud and managed services deal for an IBM i …

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• Will IBM i Become More Like Linux?

  June 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The recent launch of Merlin, a Linux-based collection of tools for creating next-gen IBM i applications, has raised questions about the future of IBM i. One of the questions has to do with IBM i’s relationship with Linux, and whether it will have to be become more like Linux to survive. Just like IBM i had to become more like Unix and Windows Server, in many ways, to survive.

  Merlin is a different sort of product than what IBM typically ships. For starters, it isn’t a modernization tool per se, but more like a collection of tools that allow …

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• More IBM i Merlin Details Emerge at POWERUp

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We are getting a more complete picture of IBM i Merlin, the DevOps offering that IBM introduced last month with the launch of IBM i 7.5. Among the most interesting revelations at COMMON’s annual POWERUp conference last week is that Merlin will be a vehicle for delivering a range of functionality to the platform in the future, not necessarily limited to app dev.

  IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, or Merlin, is a new offering from IBM. The software, as it exists in its first incarnation, enables users to develop IBM i application in ILE languages through an …

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• 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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