Timothy Prickett Morgan
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If It Can Move To Cloud, It Will; If It Can’t, It Won’t
March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cloud is a distribution model more than it is a technology transition in the datacenter, and even before Amazon Web Services launched in March 2006, a lot of us were contemplating returning to the time-sharing, utility model of compute. It was a natural thing after enterprise IT shops dealt with decades of best-of-breed computing and systems integration as well as a wave of outsourcing. If you could pay IBM to run your IT shop as it is, why not just pay someone to create a better one and put it on their books?
This cloud thing – which has the …
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Fresche Takes On IBM i Security With Trinity Guard Acquisition
March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are things that you worry about that you can’t do anything about, and there are things that you worry about that you actually can do something about – and have a fiduciary responsibility to do. Death and taxes are in the former category, and the security of mission-critical IT platforms are in the latter.
Fresche Solutions, which expanded from its core application and database modernization business with the acquisition of Abacus Solutions last October, has been on the hunt to do more deals to help IBM i customers tackle the hard problems they face and give them new …
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IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron
March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.
But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …
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Log4j Security Hole Found In OmniFind Text Search Server
March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Who would have thought that a logging utility written in Java and available for more than two decades could cause so much trouble? But that is the nature of the Log4j security vulnerability, which has been installed in all kinds of systems software and which had a Log4Shell vulnerability that was discovered by Chinese computing giant Alibaba on November 24 last year and that was revealed to the world on December 9 as a zero-day vulnerability.
There are several areas of the IBM i software stack that use the Log4j logging utility, which is one of the many Apache open …
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IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace
March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …
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The Low-Down On IBM’s Power Systems Sales
March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Late last year, IBM, under the new regime of Arvind Krishna and in the wake of the acquisition of Red Hat and the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business, reorganized its businesses and the financial reports it gives to Wall Street investors. Generally speaking, the way Big Blue is talking about itself, from a financial perspective, is more accurate than the reorganization it did after Ginny Rometty had been at the IBM helm for a bit. Which is good. But the one downside is that we lost visibility into the Power Systems platform.
We lamented this when looking at …
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April Fools, Or Not: IBM Raises Power Systems Prices
February 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In an inflationary environment with all kinds of parts shortages, it is no surprise when IT suppliers raise their list prices and/or cut back on the depth of their discounts as they negotiate deals. We are certainly in that kind of environment, and we are also on the cusp of new Power10-based entry and midrange server announcements from IBM as well.
Given all of this, we expected Big Blue to be announcing some price increases on older Power9 iron, which might be in short supply and therefore might be subject to “opportunistic pricing” as too much demand is chasing too …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans
February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.
But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …
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The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part One: The Operating System
February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You probably already figured this out, but we love data here at The Four Hundred, and we are always particularly keen on any data that helps us to understand the IBM i ecosystem better. And that is why we always look forward to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey report that comes out in January each year from HelpSystems, and because we are thankful for the data they gather, we help push the survey every year and also participate in the webinar for it as well as a donation to the IBM i community.
IT Jungle co-editor Alex Woodie …
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Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service
February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.
To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.
The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …
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