Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Crazy Idea Number 615: Variable Priced Power Systems Partitions
April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you stare down the blank page as much as I have in my career, you learn to not be afraid of that blank page. If you look at it long enough – usually for only a few minutes – ideas flip into existence like quantum particles spinning their curlicues. Most of them are silly, some are utterly useless, but eventually you get one that is worth following to see where it might go.
So it is with an idea that popped into my head, which was a daydream about IBM creating variable priced partitions on the Power Systems machines. …
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HCI Is The Dominant Converged System, Probably For Good
April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Way back in the dawn of time, all systems were “converged,” meaning that their compute, storage, and networking were embodied in their totality within the same system. These functions were pulled apart and a slew of best-of-breed server, switch, and storage appliances were created and they could be mixed and matched in myriad ways. Some might say in too many ways for the vast majority of IT shops, who don’t have the luxury of bales of money laying around to attract PhDs in computer science.
As distributed computing really took hold in the 1990s, but the 2000s it was clear …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus
March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Welcome to a new series in The Four Hundred called In The IBM i Trenches.
We spend a lot of time talking to people at IBM and at the key suppliers of systems software, application software, and development tools for the IBM i platform. But the ecosystem is a lot bigger than these players. There are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, depending. There are suppliers of third party maintenance as well as technical support and all kinds of programming and system management services. And there are an increasing number of hosting …
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Some More Power Systems Stuff Swept Into The Dustbin
March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the Power10 machines starting to come out later this year, the Power9 machines in the field for three years or so depending on the make and model, and the Power8 machines looking long in the tooth (but still technically and economically viable), you have to expect that Big Blue will wind down the sale of more and more older features.
In announcement letter 923-035, IBM has done just that. Nothing too big, but we think you need to be made aware of it just the same. And as you might expect, IBM also put a plug into the …
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Don’t Be A Blowhard
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.
Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …
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It’s Harder To Hear The Pulse In The Server Market
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
More than any other piece of equipment that does into the datacenter, the server is an indicator of health and wealth. Over the more than three decades that The Four Hundred has been published, we have spent a lot of effort and time to understand how the world is investing in what kinds of servers, including Big Blue’s midrange systems running OS/400 and IBM i, and how the trends change over time. And we are committed to doing that going forward, even though it has just gotten a little bit more difficult.
For the past several decades – I honestly …
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IBM i Wish List: Add A Virtual IBM i Platform Like System z Wazi
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Serendipity is a funny thing; part serene and part dippy, I suppose. I was poking around for something interesting that might be relevant to the IBM i platform, and ran across announcement letter 221-122, which was for something called IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. I had recently heard of CodeReady Workspaces because of the recent Power Systems announcements, but I had no idea what Wazi was.
What I now know is that I want this in an IBM i flavor.
There is no such thing as a portable and cheap and ubiquitous System z mainframe environment, …
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IBM i Bucking The Trends, Year After Year
March 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are all kinds of stability that we consider when we choose and use systems. In the IBM i market in particular, we often talk about stability in the sense of the good programming practices that companies or their third-party software vendors have for the applications that they run. Or we might talk about the underlying stability of the operating system, relational database, or middleware software on which these applications depend. Or digging down further, we might talk about the reliability and longevity and predictability of the Power Systems hardware that underlies it all. And then, of course, there is …
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We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050
March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …
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Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.
As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …
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