Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.
In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …
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Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog
March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.
Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?
In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault
March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.
So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …
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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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