Timothy Prickett Morgan
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As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow
June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.
This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …
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IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron
June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …
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UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management
June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.
Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …
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Happy Days Are Here Again For Systems
June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A combination of increases in memory and CPU prices, beefier configurations often with GPU or FPGA accelerators, and outright ebullient demand for compute capacity is making the server business look like it is exploding when it is merely expanding at a more-than-healthy clip.
In the first quarter, according to the box counters at IDC, server revenues were up an astounding 38.6 percent to $18.82 billion, the kind of number we have never seen in the history of the server racket. Server shipments – and it is getting hard to count the nodes sometimes – rose by 20.7 percent to just …
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Inside IBM’s SAP HANA On Power Playbook
May 21, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power Systems line is in transition right now, making the jump from Power8 to Power9 processors, and yet the company wants to continue selling applications without having customers wait for the newer chip to be available across the entire Power Systems portfolio. This is a particular problem when it comes to the HANA in-memory database on Power Systems, which IBM is eager to sell given the higher memory capacity and bandwidth that Power9 offers compared to the Xeon processors from Intel.
To help business partners that are peddling SAP suites on Power, which includes the IBM i platform, in …
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Getting Hyper And Converged With IBM i
May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The hallmark of the System/38 and its progeny, the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms, is that these machines came fully integrated with all of the operating system, database, management, and development tools necessary to run a modern business. Integrated did not mean that these pieces were all sold as a single bundle, mind you, but they snapped together with good fit and finish and allowed companies to not have to become masters of the system code and could therefore be craftsman for the application code that actually ran the business.
The AS/400 really set the pace for …
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Boston Power9s Set To Debut
May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power9 systems aimed at data ingest and data analytics, code-named “Boston” after the band from Beantown that features what is arguably the tightest album side in classic rock music, are now out and will be available by the end of the month. These are Linux-only machines, and like some of the prior LC models (short for Linux Cluster, not Low Cost as I keep thinking it means) based on Power8 processors, these were created by Supermicro and are resold by IBM as well as being sold by Supermicro in its SuperServer line.
IBM is, of course, Supermicro’s biggest customer …
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IBM Wheels And Deals To Boost Power System Sales
May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A lot of the revenue that comes to the Power Systems division – and perhaps the bulk of it if history and the changed nature of the product line is any guide – comes from relatively big iron machines, at least by IBM i standards for what is little, middle, and big iron. And IBM needs to do something here in early 2018 to keep customers of big iron boxes investing while it prepares to ship machines with four sockets or more of the Power9 processors under a schedule that we told you about back in February and that seems …
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Spring Cleaning In IBM i Land
May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a busy couple of weeks with IBM winding down a whole bunch of different products related to the IBM i platform. It is a kind of spring cleaning, we suppose. IBM doesn’t usually offer explanations for its decision to discontinue products, so we just have to take them at face value. Sometimes there are upgraded or replacement products, and sometimes it is just the end of the line.
In announcement letter 918-056, IBM says that it will be withdrawing the 7042-CR9 Hardware Management Console (HMC), and moreover, IBM says that going forward, support for the Model …
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Sundry IBM Announcements For Power Systems
April 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a quiet time in the Power Systems line, with the “ZZ” entry Power9 machines just announced in February and shipping in March and other machines not expected until the third quarter. But there are always some little things happening here and there, and you keep us around so we catch wind of them and report them to you.
First up, in announcement letter 118-036, IBM is offering new processor features and memory sticks for the Power H922 and Power H924 systems that are designed primarily to run the SAP HANA in-memory database on Linux atop Power, but …
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