• Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

  August 31, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

  Back in 1986, the “Fort Knox” project sought to converge the System/4300 air-cooled, entry mainframe lines with the System/38 (from 1978) and the System/36 (from 1983), and it failed. But in the failure, the Rochester Labs took some …

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• The Power11 IBM i P05 Entry Machine Finally Arrives

  July 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The new entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server, based on the Power11 processor that IBM introduced a year ago in all of the other Power Systems machines, was revealed last week and will be shipping almost everywhere in the world starting on July 24. The exceptions are that the Power S1112 will ship in Taiwan on September 14 and will ship in China and India starting December 11.

  The other members of the Power11 server family were announced on July 8 last year, and the Power11 lineup has been without a machine that is in the lowest P05 software tier …

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• You Have To Speak IBM’s Language If You Want To Be Heard

  May 11, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like many of you, I had been expecting for Big Blue to deliver the kicker to the entry level “Bonnell” Power10-based Power S1012 that was announced a few years back during the PowerUP 2026 conference. This long-awaited machine will be the only Power11 system that is offered for those many, many IBM i customers in the P05 software tier, and will presumably have a beefier hardware configuration that crosses over into the P10 IBM i software tier.

  POWERUp 2026 came and went, and there was no Bonnell+ kicker and there also was not the expected Technology Refreshes for the IBM …

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• You Are Much More Than Power Systems, And So Are We

  April 13, 2026 Doug McMaster

  The AS/400 was born in the age of minicomputers, but that was also when the rise of the personal computer started and eventually led to the revolution of client/server distributed computing. Not only was computing shifted to the PCs on our desks, but also out to file servers, print servers, and application servers that ran all kinds of different platforms, including NetWare, SCO Unix, OS/2 Server, rarely a variant of Unix, what would become Windows Server, and more recently Linux.

  Eventually, Windows Server and Linux became not only Web infrastructure and application serving platforms but ran relational databases and sometimes …

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• GiAPA Tracks SQL Performance Issues On IBM i

  March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Tracking down SQL performance problems with IBM i applications sometimes can be difficult, thanks to the mysterious ways that IBM’s Db2 query optimizer works. To help shine a light on changes the optimizer may suddenly make to query access plans, the IBM i performance experts behind GiAPA developed a new tool, dubbed SQL Observer.

  The Db2 query optimizer is a wonder of software engineering. The IBMers who developed it deserve a ton of credit for creating a smart piece of software that keeps SQL queries running so efficiently. Users simply submit the query they want to run, and the …

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• IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron

  March 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM and its business partner Cobalt Iron last week announced the launch of a new cloud backup product. Dubbed Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud, the new SaaS offering can protect data residing across customers’ landscape, including IBM Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem systems like IBM i.

  Cobalt Iron was founded in 2013 with the goal of modernizing backup and recovery. Founder Richard Spurlock saw that companies were spending too much time with platform-specific backup products, so he decided to build a centralized virtual tape library (VTL) solution that could back up and recover data across a range …

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• FalconStor Doubles Down On IBM Power With Habanero Offsite Data Protection

  January 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the secrets to the success and longevity of the OS/400 and IBM i platform is integration for the sake of simplicity. That may be two closely interrelated secrets, now that we think about it, but the important thing is that for any product or service to take off among the IBM i faithful, it has to integrate well with the platform and it has to mask complexity even when an underlying technology might be quite hairy.

  With the rise of many clouds and hosters based on Power Systems machinery and the desire to get offsite data protection to …

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• 2025: An IBM i Year In Review

  January 12, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The calendar has flipped over into the new year, bringing with it hope that the next twelve months will unfold in a positive way. It’s also a good time to reflect on what 2025 brought to the IBM i community, and to remember the big news events that occurred in our little sector of the IT market.

  January

  IBM hired a new vice president of product management for the Power Systems business. Bargav Balakrishnan was promoted to the position, which was previously held by Steve Sibley. Balakrishnan, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, …

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• Stacking Up Entry IBM i-Power11 Systems Against Windows X86 Platforms

  December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having spent the past several weeks going over the hardware and software costs and performance of systems in the IBM i P10 and P20 software tiers. We had an admittedly small sample, but one that we could get Big Blue’s pricing information for, which is hard to come by. This week we wanted to see how those entry P10-class and P20-class machines stack up against modern X86 servers based on Intel’s latest Xeon 6 systems running a Windows Server stack that was functionally equivalent to the IBM i stack.

  So we did a little spreadsheet work on your behalf.

  Our …

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• IBM Brings AI-Enhanced OpenShift Container Platform To Power Systems

  December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Given that Big Blue owns Red Hat, any Red Hat software that runs on X86 or Arm machinery should eventually make its way onto IBM’s own Power processors and their Power Systems servers. But, it takes time to do this, of course, and some Red Hat software is more important to the Power Systems based than other systems software.

  In announcement letter AD25-1628, dated November 25 when IT Jungle was, like many of you, getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, IBM said that it had Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus ready to go on its Power Systems iron. The …

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