Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices
June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The price increases that may or may not be happening to cover increasing costs at IBM continue apace. Some of the price increases we have seen over the past several months might be driven by increasing costs or the expectation of increasing costs, and others might be initiated to drive services and software revenues higher to push the profit level of the overall Power Systems business.
It is hard to say for sure.
But what we can say for certain is that last week, in announcement letter AD25-1142 dated June 2, Big Blue once again increased prices on various Power …
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IBM Readies LTO-10 Tape Drives And Libraries
June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As the capacities on flash and disk arrays continue to embiggen and the desire to keep data around is at a fever pitch as everyone is trying to figure out how to train generative AI models using all of their data, the need for tape backup for transactional and operational data has never been higher.
Which is why it is good timing for IBM to be rolling out its tape drives based on LTO-10 cartridges.
The IBM 3589 Ultrium LTO-10 cartridges, which are known as Models 554 and 654, have a native capacity of 30 TB, and with 2.5X data …
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Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage
June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.
In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …
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A Bunch Of IBM i-Power Systems Things To Be Aware Of
June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes you get a bunch of big announcements for the IBM i platform or the Power Systems machinery it runs on, and sometimes there are some smaller things that are interesting to a smaller group of people but no less important in their worlds than the big stuff.
So it is this week.
In announcement letter AD25-0887 dated May 27, which is where we also saw the withdrawal of marketing of RDX disk backup units and which we reported on elsewhere in this issue, we also see that the 1 TB and 2 TB removable disk cartridges are being removed. …
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IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.
This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …
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Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”
This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …
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Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.
The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …
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Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have a feeling that Big Blue let the cat out of the bag a little early on a price increase for its Power Expert Care technical support services for the Power10 platform. We have this feeling because IBM on May 1 canceled a price increase in the Americas region in announcement letter AD25-1009 and in the Japan region in announcement letter AD25-1048.
This is weird, and we are showing you the Americas announcement below in case IBM takes it down:
First of all, the letter number referenced for May 1 does not match the actual letter number, which …
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Another Non-TR “Technology Refresh” Happens With IBM i TR6
May 5, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you know, Big Blue released IBM i 7.6 and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6) on April 8, with the expectation that both would ship to customers on April 18. IBM i 7.6 was detailed in announcement letter AD25-0031 and IBM i 7.5 TR6 was revealed in announcement letter AD25-0077. We’re all good there. And many of the features in IBM i 7.6 were backcast as a refresh into IBM i 7.5 with TR6, if you read the announcement letters.
IBM i 7.6 was available on April 18 as expected, but we know a bunch of people …
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Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?
April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.
There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …
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