• Moving Off Big Iron? Be Very Careful, Gartner Says

  December 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i and mainframe professionals who have grown weary of defending their systems against people who want to replace them with more “modern” X86 and cloud platforms found an unlikely ally in the form of Gartner, which earlier this year published a report that cautioned against making rash, emotionally charged technological decisions when it comes to big iron migrations.

  “Replacing existing systems because people perceive them to be old can be a costly mistake,” Gartner senior analyst Thomas Klinect and vice president Mike Chuba wrote in a March piece titled Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May …

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• Servers Cool A Bit In Q3, But The Market Is Still Hot

  December 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All temperatures are relative. While the appetite for servers cooled a bit in the third quarter, according to the latest statistics from IDC, the decline is relatively modest and the period ended up still being one of the largest in history, thanks in large part to the appetite of hyperscalers and cloud builders for zillions of X86 servers.

  The declines were much more intense for midrange and big iron systems, which is typical given the product cycles from IBM. The Power9 chip is about halfway through its product cycle, and the System z15 mainframe was only announced a few weeks …

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• Power S812 Gets Another Reprieve, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For whatever reason, Big Blue did not create a cut-down version of the Power9 entry server aimed at the smallest of the small businesses that run themselves on the IBM i platform. Meaning there was no Power S912 or Power S912 Mini replacement for the Power S812 and its specially priced Power S812 Mini. (The former is based on the Power9 chip, while the latter is based on the older Power8 chip, which has a lot less oomph per core.)

  Back in March, IBM extended the life of the Power S812 and its Mini variant until November 29 of this …

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• IBM i Marketing: Not A Thankless Job

  November 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For over one decade of the three that I called New York City my home, I was the president of the board of directors in the co-operative apartment building in which I lived. For many years, I ran a half rack of servers and storage in the kitchenette in our apartment to support IT Jungle’s website and subscription database, and I ran T1 lines up the outside of the building and in through the window. It was unconventional running a business that way, but there was no cloud computing as we know it, and certainly not at the prices you …

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• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

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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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• Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms

  October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no shortage of IBM i shops that are sitting on back releases of the operating system and related systems software, or older Power Systems iron, or both. Sometimes, it takes a little convincing to get upper management to listen about how IT operations could be improved and extended if the company would only make some investments in upgrading the hardware and systems software. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, particularly when many small and medium businesses are run by their owners and in a certain sense any money that would be allocated for an upgrade is their …

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• Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

  October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

  In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

  The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …

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