Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The Power Neine Conundrum
July 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you take a very liberal interpretation of what the term cognitive systems means, including database, middleware, analytics software and the underlying system hardware and software, then IBM has spent untold tens of billions of dollars – probably hundreds of billions, really – creating its Cognitive Systems stack. We wonder what all of that analytics and machine learning software would say, with Watson’s voice of course, if it was pointed at IBM’s entire financial and technical history.
What is the prognosis, Doctor Watson?
We here at IT Jungle are an optimistic lot, and we realize that IBM, like many of …
Read more -
Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems
July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.
The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has …
Read more -
Mixed Results For IT Spending Forecasts
July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have made it through the first half of 2017, and now is a good time to take a pause and count the money that the IT vendors of the world have amassed from the hardware, software, and services they provide to the datacenters of the world. And so, IDC and Gartner have done just that even ahead of the reporting of financial results for the second quarter. The results from these two firms generally agree, and they show that, as always, different parts of the business are growing even as other parts slow or even shrink.
One big reason …
Read more -
IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops
July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.
With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …
Read more -
Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine
June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …
Read more -
How Far We Have Come
June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When the AS/400 turned 29 last week – and yes, I know the stack is called IBM i and I know that it now runs on what IBM calls Cognitive Systems based on Power processors – I happened to be on an airplane coming back from Frankfurt, Germany, after attending the International Supercomputing Conference. As it turns out, the Power9 processor married to Nvidia’s Tesla coprocessors using its “Volta” GPUs was one of the hot topics of conversation, and so was the coherent, shared memory architecture that will lash CPUs and GPUs into a shared memory space of sorts that …
Read more -
Ought To Be Committed
June 19, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Reassurance is a paradoxical phenomenon. If we are secure about something, we don’t look to be reassured about someone’s commitment to that thing; if we have our doubts, reassurance can help calm our nerves and soothe our fears, but ironically, the very act of reassurance can, in a way, undermine our confidence even as it helps reinforce it.
Funny, isn’t it?
It is with this irony in mind that we ponder some recent statements by IBM concerning its commitment to the RPG and COBOL compilers and Rational for i development tools for the IBM i platform. To be specific, back …
Read more -
The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition
June 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the Power9 processor not coming to the IBM i and AIX platforms until sometime early in 2018, rather than right now as many of us were led to believe would be happening, we have some extra time on our hands. So we should all – including the executives who run IBM Systems and its subordinate Cognitive Systems division (formerly known as Power Systems) – take this opportunity to take a hard look at how the IBM i platform is packaged and priced and how a modern integrated platform should be architected.
The IBM i customer base needs the Cognitive …
Read more -
IBM i And AIX Won’t Get Power9 Until 2018
June 5, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In case you have not figured it out yet, IBM’s biggest priority when it comes to the Power9 processor is Linux. Not IBM i and not AIX, which are Big Blue’s own operating system platforms and which have generated the vast majority of revenues for the combined Power platform since Linux made its debut on Power and System z machines almost two decades ago.
As we have previously reported, IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9 processors sometime in the second half of this year, and officially has not given a precise date for when the first systems using …
Read more -
Say Sayonara To IBM i 7.1 Next Spring
May 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We sometimes think that the IBM announcement system tries to pull a fast one on us. Like many people in this market, we watch this system like a hawk, looking for anything pertinent to Power Systems or IBM i. A very important announcement was made on April 11, well ahead of the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, two weeks ago, but no one we know saw it. A business partner saw it late last week and alerted us to it.
In announcement letter 917-080, Big Blue announced the date when IBM i 7.1 will see its software …
Read more