Timothy Prickett Morgan
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In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …
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No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.
One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …
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The Three Challenges To Securing Your IBM i Platform
July 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever you have to tackle a complex problem, it is best to break it down and then figure out a way to take on the most important and impactful issues first. And when it comes to securing the IBM i platform, nobody knows better than Carol Woodbury, president and chief technology officer at DXR Security, about how to take this “securable” system and lock it down.
Woodbury spent 16 years at IBM from 1984 through 2000, rising to become security team leader for the AS/400 platform and eventually becoming chief engineering manager for security for the platform. After leaving Big …
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Awaiting The Power10 Rollout And The New Sales Cycle
July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is difficult to be patient but before too long IBM will begin shipping Power10-based systems and the product line, which has been bumping along at the tail end of the Power9 cycle, will start growing again. With IBM having a new microarchitecture as well as a new foundry partner, Samsung Electronics, which is making its very first server chip with the Power10 and implementing its first large-scale chip with a 7 nanometer process, the stakes are high and IBM is being a little extra cautious in getting the Power10 chip out the door.
Enterprise customers are risk averse, and …
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Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort
July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.
Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …
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Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360
July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.
Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …
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Historical, Functional, And Relevant
July 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The purpose of The Four Hundred, which entered its 33rd year of publication this week, is to support the community of companies and their IT staffs – and ultimately the end users and the success of those companies – who have deployed their mission critical applications on System/38, System/36, AS/400, AS/400e, iSeries, System i, and now IBM i platforms for a decade longer than we have been around. My mentor, Hesh Wiener, and various colleagues who worked for other publications that covered the System/38 and System/36 from the time before I came onto the scene in July 1989, …
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New Converged Archive System, Power Gear Withdrawals
June 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has all of the pieces to make an appliance for archiving all kinds of data, and so the company has done just that with the Converged Archive Solution announced last week.
This box doesn’t run IBM i, but in keeping with the theme “anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer” we are telling you about it. Also, just like many IBM i shops have deployed storage area networks (SANs) to create a unified, shared storage array for their IBM i, AIX, z/OS, Windows Server, and Linux machines to share for block storage and centralized …
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The Long Play
June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Surprising things persist, and for good reasons. Around this time every year, when summer is officially beginning, I take a pause and think thankful thoughts about the AS/400 and its progeny, which trace back to the June 21, 1988, launch. I didn’t enter the market until a year later, as the cub reporter and one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, my first real job out of college and one I still gladly hold.
We have all been through a lot of change in 33 years, to be sure. The IT market is so different today from …
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Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i
June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Time is running out if you want to hear about how you can move to modern DevOps technologies and merge them with your IBM i platform, bridging the gap between new and legacy. (We don’t use the word old around these parts.)
On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting the how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch …
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