Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Evermore A Community Of Common Interest
May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you write as much as I do, and for as long as I have, you can accidentally get caught in a path of your own making that you have forgotten you have cut through the woods before. With the POWERUp 2019 conference coming up next week, formerly known as COMMON, I have a lot of things on my mind, particularly with the passing last month of Hesh Wiener, the founding editor of The Four Hundred, and of the passing last August of Dan Burger, our executive managing editor.
It is not a coincidence that the opening …
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Retranslation Could Boost Performance
May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.
One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …
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Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i
May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.
As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …
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Deep Dive On IBM i 7.4 And IBM i 7.3 TR6 Hardware Limits
April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As everybody knows by now, IBM has announced both the Technology Refresh 6 for IBM i 7.3 and the shiny new IBM i 7.4 release. We did a brief overview of these operating system releases in last Wednesday’s issue, concurrent with the launch and ahead of their respective May 10 and June 21 general availability dates, to put them into perspective. Now, it is time to get into the nuts and bolts and bits and bytes of what Big Blue has announced.
Rather than try to do it all in one story or possibly two, we are breaking it …
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Mad Dog 21/21: In Memory of Hesh Wiener
April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
“Stop complaining. The only thing worse than writing so many obituaries is having one written about you. Let me assure you.”
If my friend and mentor, Hesh Wiener, were alive today, that is what he would say to me with a laugh. And of course, as always, Hesh, who had no intention of leaving this world quite yet, would have been right.
We have suffered our share of losses in the IBM midrange in recent years, and here at The Four Hundred, the publication that Hesh created in the wake of the inaugural June 21, 1988, AS/400 announcements. Hesh …
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Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i
April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.
As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …
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IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database
April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.
Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …
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Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning
April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future.
There are many …
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Power Systems Bucks The IBM Trend And Grows
April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power Systems business continues to grow, and that is good news for all IBM i shops, particularly for those of us who actively want for there to be boisterous competition in server processors and systems architecture. It comes as no surprise that we think Big Blue still has much to offer when it comes to engineering systems that provide real differentiation in the market. The ongoing growth of Power Systems – maintaining the happiness of the substantial IBM i and AIX customer bases and expanding the Linux base – is what is required for IBM to continue to make …
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IBM i 7.4 Rolled Out, And IBM i 7.3 Tech Refresh Rolled Up
April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every couple of years, we get a new release of the IBM i operating system from Big Blue, and it has been quite a number of years since we have seen a new version of the platform. But that’s alright, since IBM has its Technology Refresh mechanism for adding support for new hardware and for adding significant new software function to the platform without breaking release-level compatibility and therefore requiring customers to requalify their applications, or worse yet, be forced to port their applications to an updated operating system.
This new Technology Refresh approach has been a very good thing, …
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