• Why The IBM i Market Needed Another VTL Option

  November 3, 2025 Greg Tevis

  Over many decades now, the IBM i community of software vendors has done a great job coming up with new ways to extend and improve the systems that IBM has built for midrange customers. But every once in a while, a new idea comes into the IBM i community from the outside.

  So it is with Compass Tape Gateway from Cobalt Iron, which modernizes IBM i backup by replacing traditional VTL complexity with an automated, software‑defined experience. It treats IBM i as a first‑class part of enterprise data protection – not a silo – so teams get simpler operations, …

  Read more

• What Price Power?

  November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things that is great about the cloud is that the cost of a configured server instance with a given compute, memory, storage, and network capacity has a published list price, including volume discounts for reserving instances over relatively long periods of time. Similarly, sellers of X86 servers – mainly Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and mainly for entry and midrange X86 machines – still have online configurators that allow customers to see all of the pricing on components and to actually configure the machines they want to order, making tradeoffs for overall price and feature function and …

  Read more

• Power Systems Grows Nicely In Q3, Looks To Grow For All 2025, Too

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a funny thing, or maybe not. In its conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the financial results for its third quarter ended in September, neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, said “Power” or “Power Systems” or “Power11” or anything directly relating to IBM i or AIX. Nary a peep, even though the Power11 upgrade cycle has begun in earnest and it looks like growth was pretty good in the third quarter and will be decent for all of 2025.

  For a long time now, Big Blue …

  Read more

• Sundry IBM i And Power Stack Announcements For Your Consideration

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is always a little mop up after major IBM i and Power Systems announcements, and there is usually a trickle of announcements that are not tied to the bi-annual launches of Technology Refreshes, which we generally expect in April and October. This latest cycle is no exception, and we have the mop and bucket out to finish out the current cycle.

  In announcement letter AD25-0006, IBM says that it will allow customers to mix and match shared utility capacity for latency compute and main memory activated using Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 om-site capacity on demand with pay per …

  Read more

• IBM Pulls The Curtain Back A Smidge On Project Bob

  October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  We learned last week that Project Bob is in at IBM, and Watson Code Assist for IBM i is out. IBM is gung-ho about the prospects for Bob to function as a do-it-all, AI-powered junior programmer for all of its platforms. But what exactly does this entail for IBM i customers? IT Jungle talked to IBM i chief architect Steve Will to get some answers.

  When IBM eventually ships the AI code assistant that is currently called Project Bob, it will offer a range of AI-powered functionality for all IBM customers, including IBM i shops, mainframe customers, and Linux and …

  Read more

• A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power

  October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.

  Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …

  Read more

• New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

  The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

  Read more

• To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable

  July 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still assembling the information on the new Power11 processor and the Power Systems machines that use them and working on our analysis before they start shipping on July 25. We will do the most thorough job that we can under the circumstances, as always, but we concede that pricing information is very hard to come by on Power10 systems and we suspect it will be the same with Power11 systems, too.

  But we will remind IBM that any new generation of machines always has improved bang for the buck, and given the modest improvements in performance moving from …

  Read more

• With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Today is Power11 announcement day, and as sometimes happens during the debut of a new processor and a new platform to go along with it, we do not have all of the details necessary to tell you everything you need to know about the new Power11 processor and the four of the five Power Systems machines that will make use of it and start shipping on July 25.

  Here is what we generally know. First, you will hear a lot of Spinal Tap jokes, like the one in the title above, which refers to special Marshall amplifiers which go …

  Read more

• With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

  To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …

  Read more

Previous Articles