Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So
April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.
This is not a bad thing. …
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Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.
In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …
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What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.
The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …
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Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.
IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …
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Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support
April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.
In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …
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Pay Attention To JDK And WebSphere Release Support
April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM i shops don’t have to use Big Blue’s WebSphere Application Server middleware to create Java, since some of the Java functions are built into the Apache Web server built into the operating system and open source programs like the Tomcat server, while not still supported, are nonetheless sometimes still used. Still other shops don’t go for the full-on WebSphere Application Server, but use the Express Edition that is bundled on the machine to provide a certain level of automation for Java workloads.
IBM has been warning customers that they have to keep current on Java Development Kit (JDK) releases, …
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The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth
March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.
And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …
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IBM Will Change WebSphere To Work In A Cloudy World
March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you had to pick one product that put IBM back on the map in software, it would have to be the WebSphere Application Server that was wrapped around the Apache Web server for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. That was back when Big Blue was the technology sponsor for the Olympics, and it used the summer and winter events, each held every four years and out of phase by two years, as a showcase for new technologies. Two years is a Moore’s Law gap, so it worked out nicely.
WebSphere was the pet project of Tom Rosamilia, …
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Bang For The Buck On Power9 Entry Hardware
March 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When it comes right down to it, there are three things that drive a server upgrade or new system purchase among IBM midrange shops: They have an aging system that has to be replaced, workloads are expanding and driving new capacity, or new workloads are being added to the system. In many cases, the situation involves two or even all three of these factors. But what gets the deal done is the value that the new system brings above and beyond satisfying those needs. You have to get a good deal so everyone looks like a hero.
The good news …
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Sundry Power Systems Announcements, Here And There
March 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The big Power Systems announcements came out in February, but IBM always has some things that need to get done. And last week, it wrapped up a few loose ends with some nips and tucks in the product line.
In announcement letter 118-030, we learned all about them. First off, IBM has expanded the storage capacity of the Power-based CS822 servers, which are special version of the Power S822 based on Power8 chips that are designed to support the hyperconverged storage stack from Nutanix. We told you all about the CS821 and CS822 servers for running the Nutanix Enterprise …
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