Smarter Planet, Smarter Computing and IBM i

By now, I think most of you have seen the “Smarter Planet” advertisements from IBM. This marketing theme has been the overarching message from IBM for a couple of years, and when you see those ads, you get a sense of the kind of world we here at IBM believe is emerging from advances in technology.

Supporting the “Smarter Planet” strategy, IBM has a “Smarter Computing” strategy, with themes and examples showing IBM technology being used to create the Smarter Computing which drives the Smarter Planet.

Last week I pointed you to a new video about IBM i that fits the first of those Smarter Computing themes: Big Data. The video features a few of us talking about data – how the architecture of IBM i, with its integrated DB2, is well positioned to provide easy ways to get more information out of the data you have. IBM i is, after all “Designed for Data.” 

Find this video at http://bit.ly/IBMiBigData.

This week, I thought I would share a story that is featured on one of IBM’s Smarter Planet sites. The site is titled “Midsize businesses are the engines of a Smarter Planet” and the featured video describes Cherry Central, Inc. Cherry Central is a longtime user of our platform, and they work with N2N Global, a software vendor and IBM Business Partner in the food distribution industry. This solution includes everything needed to run a food distribution company, up to and including the “Smarter Planet” goal of using technology for food safety. Here is the video.

Everyone involved in this solution can be very proud of what they are doing.

It is one of many examples that demonstrates that IBM i clients are already using their powerful and cutting-edge technology together with solutions from our partners to build a Smarter Planet.

Over the next few months, IBM will be telling even more stories about IBM i being used to build a Smarter Planet. In fact, our video is being featured in a Smarter Planet blog written by David Pittman. Check it out. And check back here over the next few months to see more of the Smarter Planet and IBM i story.

 

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #powersystems, #smarterplanet @Steve_Will_IBMi

Designed for Data - IBM i Video

It’s another exciting week for the IBM i community!

If you go to the redesigned IBM Power Systems web page, you will get to see a new video that we’re really proud of: “IBM i – Designed for Data.” To help launch the new page, it is one of three videos you can choose at the top of the Power Systems website. 

A while back, I made this somewhat cryptic tweet:

I was talking about shooting videos – and this video is the first we are releasing.

Part of the IBM Smarter Planet message is the focus we need to have on the data being gathered around the world. We have so much of it, but we need to figure out how to extract even more information from it than we have in the past.

While several of us had the chance to appear in this video, the star of the show is Mark Anderson, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of DB2 for i.

Mark talks about analytics in the video, and, as all of us know, IBM i has been architected around customer data from the very beginning.

I encourage every one of you to visit the page and take a look. IBM i is a key part of Power Systems, and Power Systems is a key player in the overall Smarter Planet vision from IBM. This video, as well as the ones to come, help to position IBM i within the growing involvement of IBM technology in the advances the world needs.

After you’ve seen the video on the site, be sure to show it to others who want to know what you’ve been working with, and working on, over the years.

Over the next few months, I’ll let you know as the rest of these videos are released.

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #powersystems, #smarterplanet @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

Software Pricing With IBM i Virtualization

In the past couple of blogs, I’ve written about topics that directly affect a large portion of our IBM i clients, with the RPG OA announcement and the V5R4 End of Service Announcement. Today’s topic might affect fewer of you directly, but it emphasizes three important points that are likely to affect you all, whether you see it or not:

1)    Virtualization is changing how software vendors, including IBM, are delivering, pricing and supporting their solutions.

2)    IBM’s Software Group (SWG) and IBM i are working together to give customers the kind of pricing they requested given the virtualization technologies these customers use.

3)    Requirements given to the IBM i team by our customers are extremely important in helping get things done.

About 18 months ago, IBM i added a capability to define workloads so that they could be limited to a user-specified maximum number of cores on a multicore Power Systems partition. Dawn May wrote a nice blog describing the function, so if you want to know more about it, here’s a link to her article.

This delivery was Step 1 in a two-step requirement that had been given to us by our customers. Step 2 was to have SWG Products recognize this new virtualization technology in their pricing – specifically in their subcapacity licensing.

Now, I know many of you are running your IBM i workloads on a single core. However, we also have many clients who devote multiple cores to their IBM i partition. The problem they had was this: IBM and other software vendors would charge a price for their products based on the total number of cores in their partition, despite the fact that the software product took only a fraction of the resources.

Our clients said: Can’t you find a way to limit a workload, to add a virtualization maximum, so that we don’t have to put these products in a separate partition to get a “fairer” price?

Of course, at one point in the past, some vendor software prices were based on the total number of cores in the physical machine. As partitioning was adopted more extensively many vendors – including IBM – introduced “subcapacity” pricing based on the partitioning virtualization technology. So there was a precedent to follow.

So, as I mentioned, we had two steps to take. First, we had to implement the virtualization technology. The technology is called “Workload Groups,” which is what Dawn’s blog described.

What about Step 2? Last week, IBM’s Software Group added IBM i “Workload Groups” to the list of virtualization technologies which qualify for subcapacity pricing. It’s described in this presentation and is imbedded now into the information SWG distributes about pricing for products.

All of this was made possible through the collaborative efforts between IBM and our IBM i user groups. We received formal requirements from COMMON Americas, COMMON Europe and our Large User Group. We had discussions with interested people from these organizations to show them both the proposed design of the function in IBM i and the integration into the pricing for our products. We got feedback, and we incorporated that feedback into what we ultimately delivered.

Again, while many of my readers won’t be affected by a discussion of pricing on a multicore partition, many will. And all of you are affected in one way or another by this cooperative approach to dealing with new technology.

 

Twitter: #ibmi, @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

V5R4 End of Service Date Announcement

IBM is announcing today that the effective End of Service date for the V5R4 release of the operating system (known at that time as i5/OS) is September 30, 2013.

A while back, I wrote about the questions I get asked most frequently, and I am happy that, over the past two weeks, I have been able to answer two of them in this blog. The first, of course, was answered last week when we announced the inclusion of RPG OA function in the RPG compiler and IBM i runtime. The second is answered this week, when I can finally respond clearly to people who ask “When is V5R4 going out of service?”

It’s quite understandable that people ask the question. V5R4 has been available since 2006, and with its End of Service scheduled for 2013, it will have been supported longer than any prior release. People kept expecting the end to arrive. Now we can see that end.

Over the past couple of years one of my messages in any customer presentation has been this: Clients want to be able to remain on releases longer. Why? Primarily because the move to another release is disruptive, even if the actual process of upgrading is relatively simple. And yet, it’s also important to move clients forward. Within IBM, we’ve been listening to all of our various constituents to determine the right time to end service on this good, but aged, release.

We’ve also been listening to clients tell us that they need a good amount of time to plan for that end. By announcing it today, we are giving our partners and customers over 19 months to prepare for and move to a later release.

I’ve been giving presentations, and participating in webcasts, with the topic of moving up to POWER7 and IBM i 7.1 for quite some time. And, by the way, a very large number of clients have listened. There are more clients on 7.1 now (about 21 months after its GA) than there were clients on 6.1 at the same point in its history, and this has been possible because people who upgraded from V5R4 took advantage of the ability to skip a release – to upgrade directly from V5R4 to IBM i 7.1.

Also included in the announcement is a statement of direction to offer a Service Extension. Sometime within the next year, you can expect to see a specific announcement about that, but the idea is that clients who simply need more time will be able to get it. However, the extension will cost more than their current software maintenance, and clients who buy it will not get new features or even cumulative PTF packages past the September 20, 2013 date. You can get details on this, as they are available, from your business partner. IBM will be educating business partners with the specifics as they are defined.

Over the past year or two, I have heard many customers and ISVs say that they really need to have an official V5R4 End of Service date. Some organizations will only consider a move to another release when their current release has that end date. So, despite wanting the great new column-level encryption support, or image management support, or performance improvements, they need the impending end of service to push them that last little bit toward an upgrade.

For this reason, I expect to spend the next year or so fielding questions like “What’s in IBM i 6.1? How about 7.1? How can I learn about moving up? What about that “retranslation thing? Where do I find the technical documentation for IBM i 7.1? And what about the latest news and post-7.1 features?”

I don’t worry, though, because we have the answers. If I don’t have them personally, I know the people who can get them. And I look forward to bringing these clients the news about the great new capabilities they will have on their new IBM i release.

For those of you already on a later release, stay tuned. We are not done announcing things. Not by a long shot.

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Twitter: #ibmi, @Steve_Will_IBMi