Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Take A Minute, And Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
September 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, you. Yeah, we mean you. You have something we need.
It’s information. You know, the currency of the modern era. Without it, we can’t figure out where you are and where you are going, and that means we can’t figure out where the IBM i base is and where it might be going. The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey sponsored by HelpSystems every fall is open, and we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.
This survey, which was conceived of by …
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Without Further Ado: Power10 Entry Server Pricing
September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been through the new Power10 entry servers from just about every angle imaginable, which has been our great pleasure. And now, we come to the moment we have all been waiting for: What is the bang for the buck of a Power10 machine? As is usually the case when you ask any question, the answer is: It depends.
To try to figure this out, we put together pricing information for all of the different variations of processors for the Power8, Power9, and now Power10 entry servers with one of two processors. And when we say all of …
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It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and if we hope to get some insight into what is going on in the base and report back on it in January 2023, we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.
This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base. …
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IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud
September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.
There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …
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Withdrawal Symptoms: A Bunch Of IBM Services Tweaks, Storage Deleted
September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every product comes to the end of its life cycle, whether it is hardware or software or even services because it is troublesome to repair or troubleshoot the old stuff as it wears out (in the case of hardware) or suffers from bit rot (in the case of software) or brain drain (in the case of services). And so it is with a bunch of different things that affect some big Power Systems shops.
With a bunch of new Technical Account Manager (TAM) and ServicePac services offerings for the Power Systems line, which we wrote about back in August, …
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A Smorgasbord Of Power Systems Stuff
September 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is usually pretty quiet on the IT front in the wake of the American Labor Day holiday, especially with a lot of European countries also having bank holidays around that time and many schools just starting back up again. Here in 2022, it is no different, although IBM did uncharacteristically launch the full subscription entry Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers on September 6.
In any event, in the weeks surrounding the holiday, Big Blue did a bunch of stuff relating to the Power Systems platform and we want to tell you about it so you stay …
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The Scoop On The Full Subscription Power S1014 With IBM i
September 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even before the Power10 entry and midrange servers were announced by Big Blue on July 12, we did a thought experiment at the end of June about a rumored hardware-software-maintenance bundle on the single-socket Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers with a single monthly subscription price. And for fun, that thought experiment compared the monthly cost of a high-end iPhone smartphone with cell service and a data plan – somewhere between $75 and $80 – to what we expected such a full subscription-based, on premises Power S1014 would cost. We figured it would be around $50 per IBM …
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IBM’s Competitive Analysis For The Power10 Midrange Machine
August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For as long as there has been a Power architecture, way back in 1995 with the advent of the custom “Cobra Muskie” PowerPC AS chips, the rule of thumb for performance is that the Power core did twice the work of an Intel core designed for server workloads. This was true in 1993, when Intel jumped in the server racket with gusto, and it is true 31 years later as the entry and midrange Power10 machines in the same performance class as the top-end X86 iron from Intel and AMD are starting to ramp.
This performance gap on cores is …
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Two Weeks Of Webinars On IBM i Security
August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Security through obscurity was never a good OS/400 and IBM i security strategy, even though it was a commonly held belief by many in the base. Over the decades, the interconnected of systems has become more pronounced and security threats in the IT world have ramped up and – there are related, but not exclusively causal, relationships between these two phenomena. Suffice it to say, the need to be more proactive about system and application security has never been greater.
Well, unless you count next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. . . . …
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IBM’s Competitive Analysis For Power10 Entry Machines
August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Long gone are the days when IBM, and indeed most other server vendors, clamored to run TPC-C, SAP SD, and SPEC JVM transaction processing benchmark tests on their new machines to prove they had the performance and they had the bang for the buck to compete in the broader market.
To be fair, many of those tests had their flaws, allowing a certain amount of gaming of the benchmarks (as happened with the TPC-C and SPEC JVM tests) or not having official pricing attached to them (as happened with the SPEC JVM and SAP SD tests). Still, those benchmarks, as …
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