Timothy Prickett Morgan
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What Can IBM Do To Make The Future Power S1112 Mini System Compelling?
April 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power11-based Power Systems lineup remains incomplete, with the single-socket, half-width “Bonnell” system that debuted back in May 2024 still only available with Power10 processors and not yet upgraded to Power11. We know such a machine is in the works, because Big Blue has been clear about the need to ship a machine in the IBM i P05 software tier, the lowest rung on the IBM i ladder.
We have not heard anything precise about the Bonnell kicker, and we would have thought it would have been launched in February or March. It has not. It is reasonable to expect …
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IBM Offers Trade-Ins On Storage To Grease The Upgrade Skids
April 6, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Business partners who want to help customers upgrade their flash storage are pleased that Big Blue has updated a long running trade-in program for various flash, disk, and tape storage products.
As we previously reported, IBM has just revamped the FlashSystem all-flash array lineup, with the idea of helping customers make-do in a market where prices of main memory and flash memory have all skyrocketed because of exuberant demand on behalf of the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model builders who are all trying to build gigawatt-scale systems to create better models and higher performance inference engines to turn …
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Counting The Cost Of AI Inference – And Projecting It Far Out
March 30, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is probably a good thing that most IBM i shops did not spend a lot of money trying to figure out AI in the past decade. It was enormously expensive to develop first generation machine learning algorithms, and they had limited applicability. With large language models and their generative capabilities, the use cases for AI have skyrocketed, but the costs for training have been crazy expensive since the end of 2022, when the chattybot eureka moment – some might say emergent behavior – happened.
The cost of training what are called foundation models – very large models with hundreds …
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What Is Your Plan For Offsite Data Protection?
March 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM i shops have a lot of options when it comes to getting offsite data protection for their systems of record. We want to understand what you are doing, and how that might change.
Like many IBM i shops, you probably back up your systems to tape and then store tapes offsite, or you might use cloud backup services that accomplish the same feat.
We would like to better understand what you do, why you do it, and how well this strategy works for you. And to that end, we are working with FalconStor, which provides offsite data protection services …
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We Need To Get A Little Insight From You
March 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a lot of shops that backup their systems to tape and then store tapes offsite, or they use cloud backup services that accomplish the same feat.
We don’t judge, but we do need to understand what you do, why you do it, and how well this strategy works for you. And to that end, we are working with FalconStor, which provides offsite data protection services for the IBM i platform, to survey readers of The Four Hundred.
The survey only takes a few minutes and will give us insight into what is really going on out …
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No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1
March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.
We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …
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Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection
March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.
Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …
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You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.
And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …
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More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.
In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features …
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Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.
What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …
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