Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems Has A Great Quarter; System Z, Not So Much
July 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 …
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The Power11 IBM i P05 Entry Machine Finally Arrives
July 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The new entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server, based on the Power11 processor that IBM introduced a year ago in all of the other Power Systems machines, was revealed last week and will be shipping almost everywhere in the world starting on July 24. The exceptions are that the Power S1112 will ship in Taiwan on September 14 and will ship in China and India starting December 11.
The other members of the Power11 server family were announced on July 8 last year, and the Power11 lineup has been without a machine that is in the lowest P05 software tier …
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FalconStor Creates Cloud Clean Room To Prove Backup Recoveries Work
July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a bit sad to say this, but a lot of IBM i shops are still relying on tapes to backup their system software as well as their application software and the databases that drive them. There is nothing wrong with tape, and it makes sense to do offsite backups to tape and park them in Iron Mountain or some other facility. But the problem is that recovering from tape is a nightmare and no one knows if the recovery is going to work until the bad day when something goes wrong – through human error or hacking or …
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Talking Git On IBM i With A Bunch Of IBM i Gits
July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there is someone on planet Earth who is most definitely not a git, it is Linux operating system kernel and Git version control system creator Linus Torvalds. The term git was absolutely meant to be pejorative, but it has softened over the years in part because Torvalds chose the name for his version control system precisely to mock himself. The meaning of git is shifting from incompetent senile fool toward curmudgeon and is heading toward old fart.
Torvalds manages one of the largest software projects in the world, and in the early 2000s chose BitKeeper, a proprietary source …
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More Power Systems Price Hikes, This Time They Are “Directional”
June 22, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you well know by now, prices for CPUs, GPUs, main memory, and flash storage have gone completely bonkers thanks to the GenAI system buildout, with systems specially designated for AI workloads now comprising 70.2 percent of the $122.6 billion in system revenues during the first quarter. AI sales would be even larger, and so would sales of traditional systems, had it not been for component shortages that have been consequently driving prices higher. But if there was no shortages to begin with, maybe revenues would also not be so crazy, too, and shipments would be maybe 30 percent to …
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Have You Tried To Buy A Server Lately?
June 22, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are trying to get new servers for you company, you better brace yourself for some very serious sticker shock. It’s crazy town out there. The GenAI boom has gone from chemical explosions to nuclear ones, and the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and now the AI model builders are ponying up huge sums for AI systems, driving the total market to an expected $330 billion this year. And all that AI server buying puts these tech titans at the front of the line for DRAM main memory, flash storage, CPUs, and GPUs.
The radical price increases for these components is …
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In The Trenches With: JAMS Software
June 8, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a world where applications and workflows are spread across multiple on premises systems and across the clouds, keeping track of how those applications and workflows are performing, fixing them when they stall or fail, and making sure everything is monitored and governing properly is a big job. And probably one that you don’t want to take on with so many other things going on.
JAMS Software, which has been selling workload scheduling software for more than four decades, wants to help. JAMS was spun out of systems software conglomerate Forta a year ago last week, and has a …
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Big Blue Is Still Talking About Future Power Processors, Which Is Good
May 18, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The details are really thin, as usual, but IBM is still talking about the advantages that the Power10 and Power11 processors have over other server-class CPUs in the market today, as Power chief architect Bill Starke did at the most recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans. And Starke always ends his presentations with a hint or two about what Power Next or Power Future – what we would call Power12 – might look like.
Many of the things that Starke talked about during his two presentations at POWERUp 2026 are things that we have been talking about with Starke for …
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You Have To Speak IBM’s Language If You Want To Be Heard
May 11, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Like many of you, I had been expecting for Big Blue to deliver the kicker to the entry level “Bonnell” Power10-based Power S1012 that was announced a few years back during the PowerUP 2026 conference. This long-awaited machine will be the only Power11 system that is offered for those many, many IBM i customers in the P05 software tier, and will presumably have a beefier hardware configuration that crosses over into the P10 IBM i software tier.
POWERUp 2026 came and went, and there was no Bonnell+ kicker and there also was not the expected Technology Refreshes for the IBM …
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Power Systems Still Waiting For The GenAI Bump
April 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the Power11 systems upgrade cycle only nine months old and with price increases that have been happening monthly since early April 1 and possibly continuing through the end of the year, we expect for the Power Systems business to be up in 2026 for the full year.
In the first quarter of 2026 ended in March, IBM’s Infrastructure group, which includes sales of servers, storage, operating systems, and used gear, posted sales of $3.33 billion, up 15.3 percent. Gross profits rose by 24.2 percent for the Infrastructure group, to just a tad under $1.9 billion, and pre-tax income for …
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