IBM Power Systems and IBM i @ LinuxDay 2019

IBM Power Systems and IBM i @ LinuxDay / Carinthia / Austria

As I’m a graduate of the HTL-Villach and the LinuxDay was co-organized by Mario Kleinsasser and Bernhard Rausch - both coworkers at STRABAG SE - I posted a CFP: Node.js on Midrange Server?

The technical setup was the easy part. I already had setup the Java code deployment to IBM i systems with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines. Thanks to the effort of Jesse Gorzinski, Kevin Adler and the rest of the IBMiOSS team at IBM the installation of Node.js was done in a minute. With YUM and RPM on IBM i PASE this is not a miracle at all.

I talked to Roman, also a business colleague, to write a simple Node.js web page and an interacting 5250 screen. Thanks for presenting this part at our talk.

The idea for the outline was to show that open source software in a business context has to work together with legacy systems and that this can be done with a popular open source coding framework. Second goal was to reach the students and show them that there is a big IT company within STRABAG SE as well.

So all was fine until I realized, that this will be my first talk about IBM i in front of an audience which knows little to nothing about IBM Power Systems and/or IBM i operating system.

It took me four after-work sessions to end up with the final outline:

• Differences between Power Systems and x68 servers
  
• Power Systems are Green and good for data center costs
  
• The OpenPower Foundation
  
• The idea and basic concepts of IBM i/OS
  
• Highlighting
  
  • Single Level Storage
    
  • Subsystems and its correlation to docker
    
  • The advantage of the TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface)
    
• IBM i/OS - features
  
• IBM i/OS - integration incl. PASE
  
• IBM i/OS - open source software in PASE
  
  
  
  
• YUM

Followed by Roman’s part:

• Live Demo - background
  
• 5250 screen vs. Node.js web app
  
• DevOps flow
  
• GitLab
  
• GitLab CI/CD Pipelines
  
• The Live Demo
  
  

  

I really loved to do the session and to talk about the long and lasting story of IBM i, Power Systems and the active Open Source initiative. It was nice to chat with some of the visitor afterwards and I’m looking forward to LinuxDay 2020 (Carinthia / Austria) - Be there!

P.s. Thanks to IT Power Services and IBM Österreich for organizing IBM related giveaways for the event.