IBM, Design a new System/360

What we need is everything in one box, all the latest technology, and easy to scale up. Can IBM deliver? Probably not but we can dream.

It is beyond time for IBM to not only create a converged platform for its customers, but also beyond time for the company to create datacenter-scale infrastructure that can represent the future of enterprise computing. That was what I was talking about last week when I was lamenting the departure of Jim Whitehurst, formerly chief executive officer of Red Hat and formerly president of IBM. As the title of that story implies – Historical, Functional, And Relevant – if I had a wish, it would be to create a system that was integrated (meaning it has everything that customers need) and scalable (meaning it could span from a single-core system for deskside use in the smallest of companies all the way up to a full-blown datacenter). And when I say system, I mean system: Compute, network, and storage, and as much offload and processing in the network as possible and only applications on the server processors.

IBM I cloud instances available

Neato!

With ezDev, developers will get access to the latest Power9 and Power10 systems, equipped with the latest IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 operating systems and development tools. These ezDev cloud partitions include modern IBM compilers as well as open source technologies that are increasingly used in IBM i shops. This will allow developers to access the latest development tools and have full systems control with QSECOFR authority. (It is important to be able to test applications for security vulnerabilities as they are being coded or refactored, and ezDev allows this to be done on a true developer system, not on a production environment and includes their custom ezSecurity SIP package to configure and manage system security.)

PS/2 AIX!

Now there's a good way to spend your weekend.

A new version of OS/2!

This is clearly madness.

When the Blue Lion project was announced at the American WarpStock in October 2015, the name was only temporary. Following the close of events at WarpStock Europe, Arca Noae managing member Lewis Rosenthal noted in an interview that the final product name for the new OS/2 distribution is ArcaOS 5.0. The significance of the version number relates to IBM OS/2 4.52—the last maintenance release of the platform released by IBM in 2001.

It seems eComStation is having some problems.

Free MQ for developers

Neato.

Linux-only mainframes

Might be good?

A little bit about the IBM i.

Despite all of the noise about security, apparently it's still terrible.

The overall lack of monitoring rates as one of Tatam's top three security annoyances, with 22 percent of the systems surveyed did not have an audit journal repository, and more than 50 percent of IBM i systems had no exit programs in place to monitor or control access to network services such as FTP, Telnet, and ODBC.

Oy. But it gets worse. IBM seems very interested in squeezing their customers, instead of giving them value.

A Power E850 is a four-node machine, so in theory it would support twice as many fan out features (48 card slots). That's where it might have impact in the midrange space where I live and work each day. So fret less about the lack of Power E850 support for IBM i, a religious battle, and more about how IBM is driving the cost of computing up for the P20 customer, a total cost of ownership battle.

I would love to develop software for the system, but since my price is zero and my license is GPL, that's hard to do.

How to fix IBM

RXC gives some ideas. It's not pretty.