IBM i Customers Believe IBM i Is 'Future Proof'

Jul. 10, 2013by Chris Maxcer in PowerMaxcer

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Here's a gem: Infor recently completed research into its customer base—70,000 strong—that revealed that its 16,000-plus IBM i-running customers still consider IBM i on Power Systems to be the platform the future. Of course, Infor's customers typically run some or several of Infor's ERP suites, so these are customers who are deeply committed to serious enterprise-wide solutions. 

Twenty-five years after the launch of the AS/400 and evolution of name changes, Infor reports that IBM i has retained its core values of reliability and low total cost of ownership.  Infor’s EMEA System i Survey 2013—with results from more than 100 managers and high level decision-makers—revealed a vote of confidence in IBM i. However, Infor says, the report also flags continuing concerns around skills and cloud.

 

"As the biggest IBM partner with more than 16,000 customers worldwide using the platform, Infor has access to a lot of end user insight,” notes Paul Field, general manager of Infor's System i/IBM i group in EMEA. "It is clear from this research that a lot of businesses are still reliant on IBM i and that the platform is holding its own amongst younger technologies. The reliability, cost-effectiveness and security of the platform combine to make it virtually future-proof at 25 years old. This is in itself quite an achievement but even more impressive is that the platform continues to remain relevant with new updates and investment in capabilities such as mobile or analytics."

 

He adds, "It is clear, however, that some of this investment will need to focus on maintaining a base of skilled staff that will form the basis of this continued ROI in years to come."

Key Findings

• 71 percent of IBM i platform end-users agreed with the statement, "We believe our System i platform is future-proof." Twenty-two percent were neutral to the statement and only 7 percent disagreed.
   
• When asked whether their business system is "very reliable," 92.5 percent agreed while the remaining 7.5 percent were "neutral." Side note: None of the respondents running their mission-critical business systems on IBM i disagreed.
   
• The survey results also support the widely-held belief that IBM i applications can be deployed faster and maintained with fewer staff. When asked whether total cost of ownership of their system compares well with alternatives, nearly two thirds—63 percent—agreed.
   
• When asked whether users are able to access the data they need to run the business, 71 percent agreed, with the vast majority of the remainder giving a neutral answer. Only 8 percent disagreed -- proving that even a mature business system, kept up to date, will continue to serve business needs very well, Infor says.
   
• The report shows that the industry is reaching a tipping point on IBM i skills with 52 percent of respondents saying attracting and retaining critical IT skills is becoming a problem. The role of cloud computing in addressing these issues is also far from clear. When asked whether cloud could help address skills shortages, 53 percent were neutral.  Surprisingly a further 33 percent said cloud could not help.
   
• Looking ahead, many users indicated that they plan further investment in the platform: 90 percent of respondents consider reporting and analytics, additional functionality, mobile, and 24x7 availability as either a need or a priority for investment.

 

To see additional findings and download the full survey results, check outinforsystemi.com/survey/.

 

IBM AS/400 Turns 25: Will It Last Another 25 Years?

By Sean Michael Kerner (Send Email) 
June 24, 2013

Some server operating systems were built to last the test of time. The IBM AS/400 is one such system.

"Today we call it the IBM i, because the 'I' stands for Integration," Ian Jarman, Business Unit Executive, Power Systems Lab Services & Training at IBM, told ServerWatch. "The integration operating environment runs today on our latest Power systems and also on our latest PureSystems."The AS/400 (Application System/400) was first introduced by IBM 25 years ago in June of 1988, and it's a system that is still alive and well today in 2013. Though the core server operating operating system that constituted the AS/400 is still alive, the name AS/400 as a product brand is not. In 2008, IBM rebranded what had once been the AS/400 as System i.

The original AS/400 operating system was a combination of IBM's System 38 and System 36 that were merged together. Jarman explained that the AS/400 was actually the name of the hardware platform, while the operating system was originally known as the OS/400

The AS/400 operating system from its birth 25 years ago has always been an integrated operating system that includes an IBM DB2 relational database.

In Jarman's view, the biggest change to the platform occurred in 2008, when the IBM i operating system was brought together with IBM's AIX Unix operating system and Linux onto the same Power server systems.

PHP

When the AS/400 was first introduced the concept of open source software didn't really exist. In 2013, open source is a reality and IBM i integrates with the open source PHP language to further extend the platform.

"One of the areas of strongest growth for new applications on the platform is PHP, as people use it to link out to web and mobile applications," Jarman said.

RPG IV

When the AS/400 first debuted one of the most popular languages for programming on it was the RPG IV. As it turns out, 25 years later RPG IV is also still alive and well, too.

Jarman noted that just as the AS/400 has been transformed over the last 25 years, so too has RPG IV.

"RPG is an incredibly efficient transaction processing language," Jarman said.

He added that RPG now works well with other modern languages such as PHP and Java.

"You can put a PHP front-end with an RPG IV backend," Jarman said. "That combination is very popular because people that come from PHP are able to very easily familiarize themselves with the new RPG IV."

AS/400, AIX, Linux

When it comes to the open nature of the Power architecture, the IBM i, AIX and Linux operating systems can all exist on the same server, at the same time.

The multi-OS nature of Power is enabled by way of the PowerVM virtualization technology.

"The vast majority of our IBM i users today are using PowerVM to virtualize their systems," Jarman said. "It's very common for people to run a combination of operating systems because that's the way they can drive the highest efficiency."

The Next 25 Years

While IBM is now celebrating 25 years of the AS/400, it isn't resting on its laurels. There is a planned IBM i 7.2 release set for next year as development and innovation on the platform continue.

One of the areas where Jarman expects IBM i to grow is on the PureSystems portfolio. The IBM PureSystems approach itself is an integrated, storage, compute, networking and applications stack.

"PureSystems gives us the ability to run IBM i and Windows workloads or Linux on x86 workloads very efficiently together," Jarman said.

From the day that AS/400 debuted 25 years ago to the modern day, Jarman stressed that a key component of the architecture is that it has a technology-independent machine interface.

"Effectively what that does is it protects you from technology change," Jarman said. "It's difficult to predict the future, except to say that in next 25 years the technology underneath IBM i will fundamentally change."

The promise of the IBM i is that it is able to change as underlying hardware changes. It's a promise that could see the platform survive for the next 25 years.

"I'm very confident given that we made a big promise of technology independence 25 years ago with the AS/400 and we delivered on that promise, I'm very confident that people will be running IBM i applications 25 years from now."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Gartner Publishes 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM

Monday, 10 June 2013

Gartner Publishes 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM

Posted by John Burnham in Security Intelligence

Just as surely as spring has established a foothold on Cape Cod, the SIEM Magic Quadrant for 2013 has published. The news is out, and IBM Security has improved our position as a Leader in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) again — marking the 5th year in a row that IBM Security/Q1 Labs has achieved this leadership position. For the first time, IBM/Q1 Labs is in the top position in the SIEM MQ.
IBM/Q1 Labs also received outstanding scores and improved standings in the 2013 SIEM Critical Capabilities report, which provides numerical ratings of vendors by capability and use case.
Back to bragging: IBM/Q1 Labs is rated #1 (above every other vendor) on “Ability to Execute” (the Y-axis).  This represents overall viability, product/service, customer experience, market responsiveness, product track record, sales execution, operations and marketing execution.

• IBM/Q1 Labs is rated above major competitors (McAfee/Nitro, Splunk, LogRhythm, and RSA) on both “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision” (the X-axis).  Completeness of Vision represents product strategy, innovation, market understanding, geographic strategy, and other factors.

• IBM/Q1 Labs is rated highest in the Critical Capabilities report for essential elements of Security Intelligence with Big Data: Analytics and Behavior profiling

• IBM/Q1 Labs is the highest rated in the SIEM Use Case, Product Rating, and Overall Use Case categories.

Besides vendor chest-thumping, what does this mean to our customers? Simply this: the creation and development of the IBM Security Systems division concurrent with the acquisition of Q1 Labs ensured:

• Customer-facing focus
• Continued and increased investments in Security Intelligence
• More opportunities to engage with more customers worldwide
• More 3^rd party partnerships to ensure Big Data collection from more and more sources
• Resources unique to IBM. And face it, no one knows data like IBM.

 

IBM i for Enterprise Business

Quantifying the Value of Resilience

The IBM i operating environment has a longstanding track record of maintaining extremely high levels of availability, security and disaster recovery that are – by wide margins – greater than any competitive platform. What is the value of these strengths? Few would dispute that disruption of core enterprise systems can affect the bottom line. Many organizations, however, do not factor costs of downtime into their platform selection processes. This may be a serious mistake. Business damage due to planned as well as unplanned outages may vary significantly between platforms.

This report presents two sets of three-year cost comparisons for use of IBM i, Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC), and Oracle Exadata Database Machine to support core enterprise systems in six companies. Comparisons are presented for companies operating supply chains, and for financial services companies with revenues of between $1 billion and $10 billion.

Results uncovered:
Costs of downtime – i.e., business costs due to outages – averaged 90 percent less for use of IBM i than for Windows server clusters, and 71 percent less than for Oracle Exadata. This calculation is for planned outages and unplanned outages of less than three hours duration.

Lower IBM i costs of downtime translated into three-year business savings of $2.8 million to $35.3 million compared to use of clustered Windows servers, and $700,000 to $8.6 million compared to use of Oracle Exadata.

Risk exposure to severe unplanned outages of 6 to 24 hours duration is also significantly lower for use of IBM i. These calculations, which employ a standard probability/impact methodology, indicate that risks of severe business damage for use IBM i average 93 percent less than for use of clustered Windows servers and 73 percent less than for use of Oracle Exadata. These variances translated into $257,000 to $7.43 million in higher risk exposure for use of clustered Windows servers and $56,000 to $1.69 million for use of Oracle Exadata.

Comparisons are based on use of IBM i 7.1 with IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i high availability clusters on latest-generation Power Systems; Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and WSFC on latest-generation Intel E5- and E7-based platforms; and current Oracle Exadata models with Oracle 11g Database including Real Application Clusters (RAC).

Lower costs of downtime and risk exposure for use of IBM i are due to fundamental differences in architecture and technology.

Not interested in this report, click here to learn more about IBM i.

IBM Systems Magazine - 25 Years of RPG | IBM i | IBM Systems Magazine | iSeries AS/400 System i Power Systems| history, anniversary, versions

IBM Systems Magazine - 25 Years of RPG | IBM i | IBM Systems Magazine | iSeries AS/400 System i Power Systems| history, anniversary, versions

IBM Systems Magazine - Authenticating on the Web

IBM Systems Magazine - Authenticating on the Web

IBMi25 Not Slowing Down

by Chris Maxcer in PowerMaxcer (24 april 2013)

IBM's IBMi25 celebration remains in full swing, and if it's been a while since you first checked out the IBMi25 Facebook page, head on over for the reveal of more descriptive chapters of the IBM i story. 

Number six is "Subsystems - Hostel or hotel?" 

 

Here's my favorite excerpt from the chapter: 

 

IBM i subsystems are the business hotel rooms of the operating system world. Within one image, subsystems isolate database and application workloads, matching resources and priorities to business service goals. They are, very simply, designed for business.

 

More like hostels, x86 operating systems are not designed to isolate workloads; if one process fails, it may affect another. To avoid conflicts, applications and databases are typically run in separate virtual machines or servers—they’re moved to a different hostel.

 

Plus, there's a new video by IBM's chief architect for IBM i, Steve Will: 

 

 

And number seven? "7. Object orientation – May I see your badge, please?"

 

IBM i was designed to be object-based, meaning the operating system will ensure that each of the hundreds of object types entering the system will behave predictably and within the limits of a user's authority. Object-oriented security helps protect IBM i against malware or other malicious attacks and is the foundation for its well-earned reputation as one of the most secure IT systems for business.

 

In any event, there's all sorts of IBM i goodness going on here, and it's worthwhile to check out the celebration, if only to bone up on IBM i awesomeness. As for Facebook likes, IBMi25 is up to nearly 1,100. 

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