Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Looking For Some Insight On IBM i Security
February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question that one of the biggest challenges for IT infrastructure and the applications that frolic atop it is making it the whole shebang secure. And with companies needing to provide more access to systems with users being remote and new ways of allowing customers to directly place orders, rather than through normal distribution channels thanks to the acceleration of trends caused by the coronavirus pandemic, making sure IBM i systems are secure has never been more necessary.
Oh, and did we mention that the Internet is a hostile environment, if not an outright war zone?
People need …
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Looking For Some Insight On IBM i Security
February 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question that one of the biggest challenges for IT infrastructure and the applications that frolic atop it is making it the whole shebang secure. And with companies needing to provide more access to systems with users being remote and new ways of allowing customers to directly place orders, rather than through normal distribution channels thanks to the acceleration of trends caused by the coronavirus pandemic, making sure IBM i systems are secure has never been more necessary.
Oh, and did we mention that the Internet is a hostile environment, if not an outright war zone?
People need …
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Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack
February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.
(For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …
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What Does This Year Look Like For IT Spending?
February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those who run businesses always keep two sets of data in their heads. One set is how their own business is doing relative to itself over past months, quarters, and years. And the other is how the economy at large is doing. Figuring out the correlation between the two, and what to do as these two data sets converge – or don’t – is essentially the task of upper management. It’s an art, not a science.
Around this time every year, we like to take a survey of what the big IT consultancies say in regard to IT spending to …
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Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops
February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.
It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …
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The Humongous Investment In IBM i People
February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.
This history continues, and is …
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Taking The Pulse Of The Used Server And Storage Market
February 3, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those of us who buy certified pre-owned vehicles know a secret that some of our peers in the datacenter also know about buying certified pre-owned servers and storage: You can get a lot better bang for the buck by staying one generation behind, and not really sacrifice much in the way of performance and features.
And in the case of IT, unlike the situations with families buying vehicles, some customers have to stay two generations or more behind because of the limitations of their application software. And so they absolutely need to stay back on vintage iron. Even then, there …
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IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23
February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.
As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …
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Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly
February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.
It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …
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Taking The Full Measure Of Power Servers
January 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Imagine, for a moment, that there was not a drive by the Chinese government to have more of its state-owned enterprises, which are among the largest companies in the country, adopt homegrown IT gear for their data processing needs, an effort that started in 2015 but really built up steam two years later when a trade war erupted between the United States and China. Imagine that trade war didn’t happen, either.
What, pray tell, would have happened to IBM’s Power Systems business over the past several years? Our best guess is plenty. At the very least, perhaps the Power Systems …
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