Timothy Prickett Morgan
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You’re Only As Old As The Applications You Feel
June 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You didn’t actually think that we would have forgotten that Sunday, June 21st, was the 32nd birthday of the Application System/400, did you? Of course we didn’t forget.
It was also Father’s Day and the first day of summer, and to be perfectly frank (Soltis), I got a new smoker from my wife and I spent the afternoon learning about the joys of hickory smoked barbeque ribs. It is a gift that just keeps giving, because I made about 40 pounds of meat in various kinds and flavors because I needed to try everything all at once. …
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The Ups And Downs Of The Server Cycle
June 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you took a pause for your server upgrade plans in the first quarter as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to take root, you were not alone. But all things considered, the period ended in March was not as bad for server spending as you might have guessed, and we think that the second, third, and fourth quarters are the real test. The first quarter was just the warmup.
Business has been pretty brisk for those who sell server components, and the ODMs and OEMs have been pretty busy, wrestling with their supply chains and trying to meet customer demand …
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IBM Wheels And Deals With Solution Edition Booster Pack
June 8, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, we told you about the double memory and double I/O request for price quote (RPQ) special deals that IBM quietly rolled out in April without putting out any announcement letters and that are still in effect until June 30. So consider this a reminder that these deals are still out there and now is a good time to invest in new Power9 iron if you want to pay less for it than you otherwise might.
But that is not all you can get. As it turns out, Big Blue is revamping its IBM i Solution Edition …
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The Technology Refreshes That Are Not TRs As We Know Them
May 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All of us have been expecting the Technology Refreshes – that is IBM i 7.3 TR8 and IBM i 7.4 TR2 – to come out on May 15. And when that didn’t happen, a bunch of us started scratching our heads a bit. Thus far, as we go to press, Big Blue has not put out a formal statement to customers about what is going on, but a number of big IBM i customers received a notification from somewhere up the chain of command about the situation, while at the same time, unbeknownst to many, IBM i chief architect Steve …
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IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn
May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …
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IBM Adds Deals And Tools To Cloudy Power Service
May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In February last year, Big Blue surprised many of us by announcing that it was putting Power8 and Power9 systems onto the IBM Cloud and offering up true cloud capacity, with utility pricing, for the capacity on Power S922 entry and Power E880 high-end servers. We did a detailed analysis of the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud offering here, and talked about the pricing for compute, storage, and networking for the service there. The offering was first available in June of last year, and subsequently the Power E980 has been added to the mix.
Now, we …
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Powers Of Ten
May 11, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The one thing that is easy to predict about designing and manufacturing a server processor is that no matter who is doing it, no matter what process in what decade, it is always hard and things always run late. Whether or not we on the outside world can see this, it remains true just the same. And that is because in any given era, with any given chip etching technique or chip architecture, server processors are always pushing up to the very limits of what is possible. And things go wrong.
This is why it is a good idea to …
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IBM Brings Flexible Utility Pricing To Private Power Systems
May 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A lot of people, including us, focus on the technologies that go into private, on-premises cloudy infrastructure and how that is almost always distinct from compute, storage, and networking technologies based on the same raw compute – Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or IBM Power, pick one – available on the public cloud. But there is an equally important gap between private and public clouds, and that is the pricing methodology for the two.
IBM’s Cognitive Systems division, which controls the Power Systems platform, wants to close that pricing gap by adopting the same flexible, utility-style pricing for on-premises Power Systems …
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Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?
May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …
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Big Blue Makes Moves To Mainstream Db2 Mirror
May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When IBM brought out its active-active Db2 for i database clustering extensions, called Db2 Mirror appropriately enough, almost exactly a year ago to improve the resiliency of databases and therefore the applications that run atop them on the IBM i platform, we had a few asks. As part of the April Technology Refresh announcements for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, some of those asks are answered and it looks like another one might be in the works.
The two most important things that we asked for are related, and it is all about making Db2 Mirror available and affordable for …
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