Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One
February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.
Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The …
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Server And Storage Spending To Recover In The Years Ahead
February 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A decade and a half ago, there was a very formal definition of what cloud infrastructure was, and the distinction between what most IT departments acquired or leased and what was rentable in the nascent clouds was obvious. Over the years, the lines have gotten fuzzier, with you being able to acquire systems with utility-style cloud pricing even though they are in your datacenter – just to give one example. Another is something called a bare metal cloud – what you and I might have called hosting in days gone by.
That fuzziness is why we always take any prognostications …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems
February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.
In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.
So it is with the decade long …
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Hey, Where Did All Of The IBM i Redbooks Go?
February 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Have you read any good IBM i Redbooks lately? Probably not, and we want to know why.
Our intrepid colleague, Doug Bidwell, of IBM i PTF Guide fame among many other things, pointed out to us this week that it has been a long, long time since we have seen a Redbook or even a Redpaper concerning the IBM i platform. This seems peculiar to us, considering all of the new features and functions that have gone into IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5. And even IBM i 7.3, which is going the way of all flesh.
If you …
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The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …
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IBM i Shops Are Still Getting Their Generative AI Acts Together
February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the great things about participating in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey put together by Fortra – and one of the reasons why our beloved colleague Dan Burger helped HelpSystems create the survey a decade ago – was that we get to have input into how the survey is created and how it evolves over time.
During the survey, our host Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, does an instant poll for attendees, and rather than ask the same question as last year, which was about where people get their information about the IBM …
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Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row
January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.
Take that in for a second. Savor it.
Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …
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The IBM i Base Is Ready To Keep Investing In The Future
January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are at the beginning of a new year, and of course that means that it was time for us to participate in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, which is sponsored by Fortra and which is now in its 10th year. We enjoy the webinar that Forta hosts to have a bunch of people from IBM and myself riff on what the survey results mean – and what they don’t mean.
Our host on the webinar was Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, and we were joined by Douglas Gibbs and Dan Sundt, who …
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IBM Cloud Storage And BRMS Get Subscription Pricing
January 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you are well aware, Big Blue is in the middle of converting the IBM i software stack from perpetual software licensing and Software Maintenance pricing to straight-up subscription pricing. Now, subscription pricing has come to IBM Cloud Storage as well as to the venerable Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS).
The new pricing was revealed in announcement letter AD23-0531, and it appears to be an option, not a requirement. Remember, for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 themselves, perpetual licensing based on IBM i software tiers will only be available through the end of March …
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End Of Support Announced For IBM Power Middleware Releases
January 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last year, Big Blue moved its current and archived announcement letters as well as its sales manuals and other systems such as PRPQ tracking from the ancient IBMLink system (which used to run on its own mainframes for the many decades that we have used it) to a new system called IBM Documentation. The latter of which may perhaps have a better look and feel, but which has a much more difficult way of trying to keep track of what IBM is doing on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.
The new IBM Documentation system does not allow you to …
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