OpenPOWER Consortium

Did you hear the big announcement last week? Google, IBM and three other companies announced their plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium‚ an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology."

Perhaps some of you had the same reaction to this news that we did. After Googling to find out what on earth "GPU-acceleration technology" is (and we're still a bit fuzzy about that), we began to wonder - "What's in it for us?" or more specifically - what does this mean for i?  

We're software people. Who really cares about hardware? Well, we care only to the extent that the hardware that supports IBM i continues to exist and advance. The expected benefit of the consortium is to grow the base of POWER, which should, in turn, ensure the continued growth of the platform - to the Cloud and beyond.

The announcement - and particularly Google's participation in it - seems to be oriented toward Cloud servers. We believe IBM i is a particularly good platform for many types of Cloud applications, with its legendary reliability and integrated security features. We hope that IBM will also recognize that connection and maybe IBM i will have a role in their Cloud plans.

The last really big POWER news story was Watson - the “Jeopardy!”-winning system, which has since been busy in many more practical applications of that fascinating technology. We have followed the whole Watson story with great interest. It is one of the most innovative applications of software and database imaginable. But it's only specific relevance to those of us interested in IBM i is the fact that it runs on POWER. So much like the #OpenPOWER Consortium announcement, the impact on us is the resulting advancement of the POWER platform.

We're going to be following this story as it unfolds over the coming months. After all, the future of POWER is the future of #IBMi.

Sunny with Clouds

Greetings from sunny Rochester! Well it is sunny today (Monday) anyway. When we first arrived on Saturday afternoon it was freezing. Not quite literally but a lot closer than one should ever expect to get in late July. There was even an overnight frost warning in some parts of the state last night.

We are actually in Rochester to participate in the kickoff meeting for a new modernization Redbook, which will be covering everything from modernizing the UI, to modularizing code, to updating the database, to ... well you get the picture. It is a daunting task but many good people are involved in the project. This week is devoted to determining the topics to be covered, so if there is anything in the modernization arena that you feel your company needs advice and guidance on, please let us know via the comments to this blog and we'll bring them forward to the group.

But Backups are Looking Cloudy

For some time now we've been trying to find a simple, reliable method of providing an off-site backup for our mission-critical files. This is particularly important during those periods (like now) when we are registering folks for our fall RPG & DB2 Summit.

We had been using FTP to send the nightly backups to an off-site IBM i, but have suffered timing issues that made this approach unreliable for reasons we won't delve into. As a result we had been looking for a commercial FTP site that might work for us, but those that we found either had file size limits that were too low for us or had prices that were too high.

We knew that sites like Box.com (where we already had an account) and DropBox.com had the kind of cloud-based service that we needed. But they didn't support FTP and we just didn't have the cycles to program to their APIs.

Just when we thought we were going to have to give in and either program to the APIs or pay through the nose for an FTP site, along came Arpeggio Software with its latest offering ARP-DROP. ARP-DROP currently only works with DropBox, but will shortly support other cloud-based services such as Google and Box.com. Best of all, it is a free offering that works in the IBM i native environment. As soon as we heard about it we signed up for a copy and loaded it onto our IBM i. Within 10 minutes were sending and receiving savefiles from DropBox using simple IBM i commands, and the performance was really impressive. Also, because the product is command based, it is perfectly suited to being used in automated backup scripts and that's exactly what we'll be doing. If you have a need for a similar tool take a look at ARP-DROP. We're really impressed with what we have seen so far and intend to take full advantage of it in the coming months. Thanks Arpeggio.

IBM i Forecast: Very Cloudy

Back in September 2010, we wrote about our "i In the Sky"--that is, our use of the iDevCloud for our own business. We mentioned another offering, RZKH from Germany (don't ask us what it stands for!). Since it has been over a year since that post, we thought we'd revisit the concept of using IBM i as a cloud server.

IBM i seems a natural choice for cloud computing, with the advanced virtualization capabilities, powerful security and simplicity of administration. We're obviously not the only IBM i users to have noted that. We even found a piece, which would seem to have been written by someone who isn't an IBM i user, on the value of IBM i as a cloud server. In "Five Characteristics of IBM iSeries: What Makes IBM iSeries Stand Out of the Crowd," you can see what we mean. What makes us say the author isn't an IBM i user? Well, the only use of "iSeries" is in the title. The rest of the article uses the term "IBM i series," an interesting mangling of current and old names for our beloved platform. Perhaps the author originally wrote it as "iSeries" and some editor ran into Trevor Perry who insisted a global change to "IBM i" resulting in yet another name for the platform (like we needed another one!).

We recently heard from Aaron Bartell about another IBM i cloud service that also sounds interesting. Since the iDevCloud service has a prohibition on commercial workloads, it's certainly not a solution for everyone. Aaron found Symmetry Corp's offerings. The company calls its solution "i in the Sky" (hmmm, where have we heard that name before?). According to Jon it is the title of an Alan Parson's Project song on the album of the same name, but we digress. In contrast to the comment above where we doubted if the author was a seasoned IBM i person, there's no doubt whatsoever about the heritage of this offering. Despite using "i" in the name, the url to the product concludes with "/as400" and we couldn't find a single reference to IBM i (or Power Systems) anywhere except in the name. And even there, the full name seems to be "i In the Sky AS/400 cloud solutions." In the details, "iSeries" and "AS/400" were used everywhere (what, no i5/OS?). Yes, certainly a seasoned IBM i person - and apparently like most of us, never quite sure what to call the platform in order to attract the faithful  (sorry, Trev).

But naming inconsistencies aside, the Symmetry offerings seem to be quite interesting for enterprise cloud computing. The company seems to be oriented to SAP on i, which in its own right is a good thing. But don't let it scare you away if you want to distance yourself from anything SAP-ish. There are offerings here for completely "generic" use of IBM i (or as it is stated "iSeries" or "AS/400") in the cloud. We haven't seen pricing, but Aaron tells us that it is competitive even when compared with comparable Windows servers.

We can attest that our own use of an IBM i cloud server for development and education has worked out very well. Apparently we aren't the only ones who have found iDevCloud to be useful. We heard recently that they are nearing capacity on the original servers and are working on getting more capacity to meet the growing demands that IBM i developers have placed on them. Great news--not only for our friends who run iDevCloud--but even more so for IBM i fans everywhere--so many IBM i developers taking advantage of a way to build applications and play with the latest technology!

We're sure many more IBM i cloud solutions are available--not only for developers like ourselves, but for production and commercial use as well. We heard runners last week of yet another cloud service, we'll report back when we get some confirmation. In the meantime, please help us identify others by posting in the Comments section.