Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year
October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.
In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …
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The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close
October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.
Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …
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Riding The Upgrade Cycle
October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In an ideal world, all servers would always be new and all operating systems and applications would be patched and running in optimal form. But we don’t live in that world. And that means for many customers that don’t have bales of money sitting around, sometimes the IBM i platform starts to get a little long in the tooth.
That is certainly the case for parts of the IBM i installed base. There are still a lot of Power5 and Power5+ customers out there who have resisted the temptation to upgrade their systems for the past five or six generations, …
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The Cloud Changes Things, But Not Everything
October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the slowest things in the world is the pace at which risk averse enterprises change their information technology. We have been talking about computing on demand and utility computing for more than two decades, and Amazon Web Services made the cloud a real thing with the launch of its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service back in March 2006. Fast forward 12 years, and EC2 is the foundation of a vast business that made $21.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, and it has utterly transformed the way people want to configure IT infrastructure so it …
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The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.
This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …
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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.
Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.
Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.
We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …
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IBM’s Own Positioning Of Power Systems Revealed
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We don’t get a lot of data about how the Power Systems business is doing out of Big Blue these days, and we get even less, in terms of specifics, about the markets that IBM is chasing and how well or poorly it thinks it is doing in this regard. We get a snippet here and there from the quarterly results, we get some insight from the quarterly market trackers from IDC and Gartner, but not much else.
Digging around through some documents relating to the Power9 rollout, we stumbled across a few interesting charts that gives us at least …
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IBM Global Financing Deals To Push Power E950 And E980 Sales
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we have pointed out many times before, Big Blue is not just a creator and manufacturer of technology, but as one of the largest renters and lessors of equipment with vast access to capital and a relatively strong balance sheet, it is also effectively a large bank focused on IT. And more times than not, it takes IBM Global Financing – and the economic might that parent IBM brings to bear – to close the deal, as much as any hardware or software technology does.
At the moment, IBM is focused on increasing sales of the midrange “Zeppelin” and …
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Disaster Recovery Can Cover Your ASPs
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Disaster recovery planning can be fun, depending on your mindset. As Hurricane Florence was heading for the Carolinas, we watched the storm with great interest before landfall and worried for a little while there the simulations of the ensuing tropical storm showed that it was going to hook a little to the west and – I kid you not – go right over Guild Companies headquarters here in Boone, North Carolina. A high developed over the Ohio Valley and bounced the storm to the south and west a little, and we did not get 80 mph winds as expected, although …
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