Timothy Prickett Morgan
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There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …
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Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers and a new one. That would …
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Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With age and wisdom comes a certain kind of calm expectation that does not necessarily put one in the frame of mind to make prognostications as much as making some observations, laying out priorities, and expressing desires. Making predictions is really about placing qualified and intelligent bets, more like hunting than the slower, measured pace of agriculture, which is about planning and fostering growth.
As I approach the new decade, I am less in the mood to don my wizard hat with its moons and stars on it and to rub the dust off the crystal ball on my desk …
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From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.
But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …
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Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers — Alison Butterill, IBM i product …
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Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i
December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.
They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …
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Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You
December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It’s hard to believe, but when January rolls around, we will start publishing the 30th volume of The Four Hundred. This is a long time to do anything, and many editors have come and gone with this publication over the years – some down other career paths, others being stopped in their tracks on this path and leaving this world too early. We are honored to have worked with them all and to do the work of serving the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i community, and we carry on this work in their honor.
This time …
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Servers Cool A Bit In Q3, But The Market Is Still Hot
December 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All temperatures are relative. While the appetite for servers cooled a bit in the third quarter, according to the latest statistics from IDC, the decline is relatively modest and the period ended up still being one of the largest in history, thanks in large part to the appetite of hyperscalers and cloud builders for zillions of X86 servers.
The declines were much more intense for midrange and big iron systems, which is typical given the product cycles from IBM. The Power9 chip is about halfway through its product cycle, and the System z15 mainframe was only announced a few weeks …
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Join Us For The IBM i On The Public Cloud Webinar
December 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After so many years of waiting, it looks like IBM i shops are going to have a wide variety of options when it comes to acquiring true cloud computing to either replace or augment their on premises systems.
IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Skytap all are offing slices of Power9 machines, which complement the cloudy and hosted infrastructure that has been available for a number of years from Connectria, iInTheCloud, UCG Technologies, LightEdge Solutions, Data Storage Corp, Source Data Products, Secure Information and Services, and First Option IT have offerings that fall on the spectrum from traditional hosting to cloud as …
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Db2 For IBM i 7.3 Hits A Bad Patch
December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you know, we are among the people in the IBM i community who are always telling you to keep current on your PTF patches for the best operating system available on Power Systems. (No, we are not talking about AIX or Linux.) But every now and again, as happens with all operating systems, something gets fixed and the fix is worse than the problem it was solving.
That has apparently happened with the database patches for the Db2 for i relational database management system embedded in the IBM i 7.3 release once the Db2 Group patches from November 13 …
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