Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Single-Level Store Redux In New Power-Flash Hybrids
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the System x division now in the hands of Lenovo Group, IBM is being more aggressive about promoting its Power Systems lineup and, in particular, a new machine that brings Power processors together Tesla GPU coprocessors from Nvidia and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Altera to create hybrid computing platforms.
The immediate benefit of these technologies are not apparent to IBM i shops, who run mostly RPG and Java code, but such hybrid machines will very likely be more common as GPU-accelerated Java comes to market in the next couple of years–perhaps next year, perhaps the year
-
Maxava Doles Out $52,000 In iFoundation Grants
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHigh availability software maker Maxava has awarded the next round of its iFoundation grants to help promote the IBM i platform.
Founded in 2011, the Maxava iFoundation provides non-profit organizations that are promoting and expanding the IBM i community a grant of up to $2,000 to help in their efforts in the IBM i cause. The iFoundation grants are a perfect example of enlightened self-interest, as is, I must add, the support we get from Maxava in our Four Hundred stack of newsletters. Without companies like Maxava supporting our newsletters, user groups like COMMON, and other national, regional, local
-
Lenovo Deal Done, Power Systems Takes Center Stage
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell, the deal is done, and IBM is completely and finally out of the X86 server business now that it has sold off the System x division to Lenovo Group. Or, to be more precise, has sold off the System x business in most of the major countries where IBM and Lenovo both had operations and could do the transfer and get the approval of regulators. Now, we find out exactly how committed Big Blue is to the Power Systems platform.
Ever since the homogenization of the server lines that started at the end of the 1990s when Sam
-
IBM Rolls Out The Big Power8 Iron
October 6, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCustomers looking to boost the capacity of their existing enterprise-class Power Systems servers got some reprieve late last week when ahead of the Enterprise2014 conference in Las Vegas IBM did a surprise launch of the E870 and E880 servers. The machines are follow-ons to the existing Power 770+ and Power 780+ machines and borrow technologies from the Power 795 announced four years ago.
The resulting E870 and E880 systems are designed to take the modularity that has been inherent in the Power Systems line since the Power5 machines were announced a decade ago and merge it with the high-end NUMA
-
IBM Deals On V3700 Arrays, Preps Dedupe For FlashSystem
September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are shopping for disk arrays for your IBM i systems, IBM has a deal for you on adjunct software functions for its Storwize V3700 storage. And the company is also making promises about adding some advanced functions to the FlashSystem flash-based arrays as well.
In announcement letter 314-098, IBM is offering software function upgrades for the V3700 at no charge. The deal is applied to the Storwize Turbo performance boost, which cranks up the I/O operations per second on the array by 50 percent and doubles the maximum throughput as measured in gigabytes per second for the
-
More Reader Feedback On Power8 Processing Power And What Matters
September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSorry for the delay in thanking you, but I have just returned from TEN weeks consulting in Singapore to rescue another AS/400 customer whose chief developer died as they were about to start a Singapore plant (12 time zones away). Plus continuing consulting when I would much rather be relaxing on my deck (the customer licensed RTPA, which is why I went to Singapore and continue consulting).
I worked 12 hours a day at the plant (24 by 7 operation) as the ONLY IT person, plus 2 hours a day traveling in a van from my $10,000 a month luxury
-
IBM Clarifies IBM i 6.1.1 And Support Withdrawal
September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IBM i 6.1.1 release of the midrange operating system that this newsletter is dedicated to was, like many prior releases of the OS/400 and its progeny, a stop-gap release to add support for Virtual I/O Server and was pretty thin as releases go. As we reported several weeks ago, IBM is set to withdraw IBM i 6.1 from marketing on December 9 and stop supporting it on September 30, 2015. But there was not perfect clarity on what would happen to its tweaked follow-on, IBM i 6.1.1.
As we previously reported, IBM withdrew IBM i 6.1 and
-
How IBM Stacks Up Entry Power8 Machines Against X86 Iron
September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are on the verge of an expanded Power8 system line from IBM and rival Intel has launched its next-generation “Haswell” Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. But the performance specs that compare the Power8 iron to X86 and other alternatives in the midrange are only just starting to trickle out of Big Blue. So now is a good time to take a look and then brace ourselves for more comparisons in the coming months.
In past issues of The Four Hundred, I have showed how the scale-out variants of the raw Power8 processors rate in terms of raw Commercial Processing
-
Cisco’s UCS Mini Enters The Midrange Arena
September 29, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOver the past five years, some remarkable changes have happened in the systems business. IBM‘s Power Systems business has dropped from around $5 billion down to around $3 billion and Cisco Systems has built a converged system business that has gone from zero to $3 billion. Cisco has gotten more than its fair share of the blade server market with green-field applications like private clouds and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and now it is looking both low and high to expand its business further.
The fact that Cisco is trying to move from enterprise-class blade servers to minimalist machines
-
Admin Alert: What’s The Danger Zone For IBM i Disk Utilization?
September 24, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWorking on IBM i and its predecessor machines for 30 years, I sometimes have to modify or redo advice that I’ve relied on for years. Case in point: how full does your disk space have to be before you put your IBM i partition in danger?
I had an experience this month that made me question my assumptions on when you should worry about and how you should set your disk utilization thresholds. Here’s what happened.
What Went Before
In the past, I’ve recommended setting your disk utilization thresholds so that the IBM OS issues this system operator message when