• Using The Public Cloud For IBM i Disaster Recovery

  April 24, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Disasters can strike at any time, and it’s essential for organizations to have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure business continuity. However, creating and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, particularly for organizations that rely on IBM i servers, often running business critical applications that perform key functions together with many interfaces into other servers and applications.

  Previously, investments in IBM i disaster recovery solutions were an expensive outlay, requiring significant capital investment in both hardware and software, in addition to the sizable costs associated with running a datacenter.

  Fortunately, with the advent …

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• IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.

  As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …

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• A Slew Of Add-On Services For Power10 Systems

  August 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, we told you about a new set of services called Power Expert Care that offered enhanced services above and beyond Software Maintenance (SWMA) for the operating system and systems software stack and the hardware maintenance that comes with support contracts. In recent weeks, IBM has rolled out more services under the Power Expert Care umbrella.

  In announcement letter 122-006, the based Power Expert Care services are extended to the Power10 entry servers – the Power S1014, the Power S1022s, the Power S1022, the Power L1022, the Power S1024, and the Power L1024 – and in announcement …

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• IBM i Licensing, Part 1: Operating System Subscriptions

  June 6, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every vendor that sells systems and/or the systems software that runs atop that machinery has had to cope with myriad transitions in product packaging and pricing with the establishment of the cloud. The transitions are difficult for both companies and their customers, but in the long run, pricing will be more flexible and equitable – and far more predictable for both vendors and users alike.

  Big Blue has offered several licensing models over the years for the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i platforms. In the early years, every piece of software had a perpetual license tied to a machine, usually …

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• Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.

  To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.

  The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …

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• Technical Debt: The Silent Killer

  October 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  There’s a dangerous malady afflicting companies that rely on the IBM i server to run their business applications. Left undiagnosed and untreated, it can debilitate an IT shop, rendering it unable to take advantage of new opportunities and respond to challenges. It’s called technical debt, and you or an organization you know may be suffering from it as we speak.

  Technical debt is a concept that is credited to Ward Cunningham, the American programmer and the co-author of Manifesto for Agile Software Development. “If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but …

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• Sundry Power Systems Cloud Announcements

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  April is generally a busy time for the Power Systems team, and not just for IBM i, but also for AIX and sometimes for Linux, too. In the spirit of Power Systems family unity, and in recognition of the fact that more than a few IBM i shops also have AIX and/or Linux in their shops, we wanted to tell you about some tweaks that Big Blue has made to the other platforms in the Power Systems family.

  In announcement letter 221-099, IBM is making some tweaks to the Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition stack of software. The components …

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• IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.

  I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …

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• IBM Grants Amnesty On Software Maintenance After License Charges

  April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Ask and ye shall receive. Last week, we were asking for Big Blue to wake up and provide a stimulus package for its Power Systems business in general and its IBM i business in particular. And one of the things we asked for – an amnesty canceling so-called after license charges for Software Maintenance for IBM i and AIX platforms was actually quietly announced to business partners – unexpectedly at that – on April 13, the same day our essay ran and three days after we wrote it.

  We think this is a coincidence, not causation. And it’s a …

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• Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.

  They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …

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