• We Are Filling Our Talent Pool Because Yours Is Going To Drain

  June 21, 2023 Ron Venzin

  Back in the early days of corporate computing, when it was called data processing, the people who managed and programmed what became known as IT systems came from all walks of life. More times than not, the VPDP – that’s Vice President of Data Processing, a title that predates the concept of Manager of Information Systems and was decades earlier than the idea of Chief Information Officer – often came from the accounting department. But the people who worked for the VPDP were a hodge-podge of smart and curious people looking for something new and interesting to do.

  Here …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

  Read more

• Entry Servers: IBM i Versus Windows Server, Redux

  April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No comparison between similar but different things is ever perfect. It is the nature of language, constructed of similes and metaphors, as well as science, which speaks in generalities but craves ever-finer precision. It is no different when trying to compare different system platforms, which we do quite often around here at The Four Hundred and have for three and a half decades.

  The comparison between the Power S1022s running IBM i and a Dell PowerEdge R7515 running Windows Server and SQL Server, which we did last week, needed some refinement, I learned from an intrepid reader who reminded …

  Read more

• Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.

  And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …

  Read more

• Why Modernize Applications? The Reasons Might Surprise You

  April 3, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A wave of interest in application modernization seems to be cresting over IBM i and mainframe shops in the United States and Europe, and it’s having some unanticipated impacts. We’re also getting a better understanding of what’s motivating companies to jump into these potentially risky projects, which is a topic that EvolveWare touched on in its latest report.

  EvolveWare, which develops modernization tools for mainframe and IBM i applications, discussed several aspects of modernization in its report on modernization released last month. Our first take on the report, which is titled The State of Application Modernization 2023, focused …

  Read more

• Data De-Dupe Gives VTL Customers More Options

  March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When your IBM i backup data is 10x smaller, the backups complete more quickly and the local storage requirements are smaller. But that’s just the beginning of the savings for customers of LaserVault, which added a new data de-duplication feature to its virtual tape library (VTL) last year.

  LaserVault has been providing IBM i backup solutions for many decades, and launched its line of VTL solutions in 2006. Customers can get ViTL, as the VTL is called, as a Fibre Channel- or SAS-connected backup appliance (LaserVault partners with Supermicro for hardware) or as shrink-wrapped software that customers can run on …

  Read more

• IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

  As we have pointed out …

  Read more

• The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty

  February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.

  What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …

  Read more

• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

  Read more

• 2022: An IBM i Year In Review: Part 2

  December 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  In part one of this now annual recap of the IBM i world that we do here at IT Jungle, we reminisced on the biggest stories of the first six months of the year. There was quite a bit going on, with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and more. But getting into the last half of the year – now that’s where the real action began.

  July

  The first full month of summer started off with a bang when IBM, after much anticipation, unveiled the long-awaited scale-out Power10 machines. The Power10 rollout included the S1014, with …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles