• Resilience In The Platform, Resilience In The Business

  November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic is making it clear just how dependent much of the global economy is on mobility, entertainment, travel, and hospitality. But it is also making it clear that many parts of the economy, thanks to IT infrastructure, are resilient and are coping with the stresses and strains.

  “The need to rapidly innovate has clearly become apparent,” Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, explained in his keynote at the recent Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event. “And we will continue to do that for AIX, IBM i and Linux,” Sibley said, …

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• IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

  When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …

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• Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.

  The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.

  The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …

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• Trinity Guard Unveils New Tools for Linux, Db2 for i

  November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Trinity Guard is on the move. The Houston, Texas, based security software company, which is the spiritual successor to the PentaSafe products, is rolling out a full auditing solution for Linux. It’s also developing a Linux version of its security management tool, TGCentral, with an AIX version up next. Plus it’s months away from releasing an encryption solution for Db2 for i.

  2020 has not been easy for anyone, but it’s not stopping the folks at Trinity Guard from moving forward on its roadmap items. Near the top of that list is increased support for running on Linux, which has …

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• IBM Keeps OpenShift Up To Speed On Power Systems

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For more than two years now, as we have previously reported, there have been a number of ways to bring Kubernetes container control to the Power Systems platform, including Docker Enterprise Edition, IBM Cloud Private, and Red Hat OpenShift. In the wake of the Red Hat acquisition, it is pretty clear that OpenShift will be the container environment of choice on IBM System z and Power Systems machines on premises and on these machines as well as X86 iron deployed on the IBM Cloud.

  To that end, we find in announcement letter 220-439 that IBM’s Red Hat unit has …

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• Remain Software Delivers Trio of Updates

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software last week announced the delivery of new releases of three separate products, including TD/OMS, its lifecycle management tools for IBM i; Gravity, its workflow management system for multiple systems; API Studio, which helps IBM i shops develop and manage API connections to existing software.

  TD/OMS, which is Remain Software’s flagship offering, is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool for IBM i developers. The core of the offering is the Object Management System (OMS), which guides users through the process of defining applications and their associated objects, while additional modules provide more targeted functionality for reporting, impact analysis, …

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• How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

  November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.

  Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …

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• IBM i Turns In Good Numbers For Q3, Bolstering Power Systems

  October 26, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Historically speaking, the Power Systems division, now the Cognitive Systems division officially within IBM, has its worst period of sales in the first quarter of any year and its second worst 13-week revenue run in the third quarter of any year. And true to form, the third quarter of 2020 was not a great one for sales of Power iron, according to our model. That model is derived from IBM’s financial results and other data, and we update it every quarter when Big Blue reports to Wall Street.

  Thanks to the fact that the Power9 generation of machines is entering …

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• Recovery Point Provides Another Option for Full-Service DR

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to full-service disaster recovery firms, most IBM i shops are aware of IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) and Sungard, the two giants of the space. But there’s a third, slightly smaller option that nevertheless should be on their list: Recovery Point Systems of Germantown, Maryland.

  Recovery Point was formed nearly four decades ago to serve the document storage needs of businesses and organizations near the nation’s capital. As tape storage took off, the company evolved its business plan and served as secure repository for tape storage, sort of a regional Iron Mountain.

  Today, Recovery Point …

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• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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