Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
And now we come, once again, to the holiday season here at IT Jungle. This coming year, which we are already planning for, we enter the 30th year of publishing news, tech tips, strategy, and tactics concerning the AS/400 and its progeny. It has been such an education for all of us, and a privilege and an honor to serve the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i communities all those years, as well as those many shops who hung back in the early years on the System/36 and System/38 platforms while we are thinking about it.
We are …
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For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security
December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.
That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …
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Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations
December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …
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Some Insight Into The IBM i On Power Systems Base
December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM is pretty secretive about its systems business, but is really no worse than its peers in this regard. Big Blue wants to get enough information out there to keep customers comfortable about the future, keep Wall Street happy about its revenues and prospects for the immediate future (meaning one to three quarters out), and keep its competitors from getting too much insight into how it is doing in the systems racket.
Every now and then, we get some insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, and as part of a discussion we had recently about upgrade and …
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Japan Is A Different IBM i Market, But The Loyalty Is The Same
November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early November, we did an overview of the IBM i market in Japan, which accounts for about 10 percent of the IBM i installed base and is third to North America and Europe, which have always dominated the AS/400 and follow-on IBM midrange markets.
In this follow-up story, we wanted to dig a little deeper and talked to two downstream resellers, Bell Data (which is a publishing partner of The Four Hundred in Japan) and Star Computer, which is a downstream partner from iGuazu, the largest distributor of Power Systems with IBM i machinery in the country. …
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Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections
November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.
They have no choice, living in the future as we do.
The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …
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IBM Winds Down PowerVM V2, Nudges Customers To PowerVM V3
November 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may not occur to you, but the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor that Big Blue created for Power Systems servers has a version just like every other piece of software in the world, and like all software, it ages and eventually it is retired from the field in lieu of more modern code.
In announcement letter 918-129, IBM let it be known that PowerVM V2, of which there were three releases, will be withdrawn from marketing on February 19, 2019 and will have its support withdrawn on September 30, 2020. That may seem like a long time away from …
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IBM i In The Land Of The Rising Sun
November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It took Europe and Japan a long time to rebuild after the devastation of World War II, but it is absolutely no coincidence that the United States alone or in combination with its NATO allies invested an enormous amount of money in the rebuilding of both of these nations. Not only was it good business, providing American manufacturers new markets into which to sell their products, it was also a good kind of cultural exchange.
The predecessor of IBM, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, sold its first punch card machine into the Japanese market back in 1925 at Nippon Pottery – yes, …
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I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices
November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.
All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …
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The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat
October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.
Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …
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