Timothy Prickett Morgan
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No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1
March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.
We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …
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Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection
March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.
Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …
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You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.
And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …
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More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.
In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features …
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Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.
What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …
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IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away
February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.
The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …
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It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy
February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.
Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …
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Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i
February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.
I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …
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IBM Takes On The Memory Crunch With New FlashSystem Lineup
February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a shortage of main memory and flash in the world right now. This is due, in large part, to the explosion in investments in yottascale AI systems that burn tens of gigawatts of juice. Such systems require a huge amount of HBM stacked memory on their GPU and XPU accelerators as well as high performance DRAM and flash in their hosts and truly enormous shared flash storage to serve up datasets.
The biggest companies buy up most of the DRAM and flash chips a year or more before they are even made, but with demand skyrocketing, the memory …
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IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales
February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as …
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