Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Nevermind About That Power, Mainframe Microcode Contract
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRemember the contractual change that IBM put out a year ago, which was locking down access to licensed internal code for System z mainframes, Power Systems, and various storage arrays based on Power7 machinery? Fohgettaboutit, as we say in nearby Brooklyn.
In announcement letter 113-027 from last February, Big Blue said it had revised the terms and conditions to machine code on these machines, making it not only explicit that licenses to machine code cannot change hands, but that they may not do so without a customer signing a license acceptance agreement. The changes were supposed to go into
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IBM Cuts A PureFlex Deal With Service Providers
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreManaged service providers who are looking to build public clouds based on Power Systems and X86 servers can now get PureFlex machines from IBM at a significantly reduced price.
The discount deal, which is detailed in announcement letter 314-017, is similar to a deal IBM gave to MSPs back in December 2012 for various Power Systems machines, including Power-based blade servers. The BladeCenter machines are basically in mothballs now, and have been replaced by PureFlex converged infrastructure. And thus the new MSP deal is focused on PureFlex machinery and the systems software that runs on it. This includes both
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IBM Slashes On-Demand CPU And Memory Prices
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs I said at the beginning of the year, I expect that IBM will start wheeling and dealing to boost sales of its Power Systems machines ahead of the delivery of shiny new Power8 systems sometime around the middle of the year or so. If you have one of the midrange or high-end Power Systems machines that have latent processor cores or main memory in the box that has not yet been activated, then Big Blue has a deal for you.
With the Power Systems CUoD discount promotion, which you can see in announcement letter 314-021, IBM is slashing
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Intel’s Xeon E7 Brings The Fight To IBM’s Power8
February 24, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSales of RISC and Itanium processors running Unix or proprietary operating systems such as IBM i, OpenVMS, NonStop, and others have been taking it on the chin in recent quarters, and with these businesses down, Intel has wound up a haymaker that puts even more pressure on these platforms. It is called the Xeon E7 v2, and an update of the Power processor can’t get here soon enough.
Code-named “Ivy Bridge-EX,” the new chip from Intel is aimed predominantly at machines with four sockets or more, but there are also variants available for two-socket machines and both Silicon Graphics and
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IBM Layoffs Start, Hitting Server And Software Units
February 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAfter closing out 2013, IBM‘s new chief financial officer, Martin Schroeter, didn’t mince words. After hefty pre-tax losses in its Systems and Technology Group, the company would be rebalancing its workforce, which is an IBM euphemism for layoffs. So is resource action.
Schroeter said IBM would book $1 billion in charges in the first quarter to cover the layoffs, and that would be somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 of its 434,000 global workforce, depending on which Wall Street analyst you ask. (Last year’s $1 billion in charges covered somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 workers.) These numbers do not include
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Samsung Joins The OpenPower Consortium Party
February 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe momentum behind the OpenPower Consortium that Big Blue started up last summer to breathe some new life into the Power chip continues to build, now that Samsung Electronics has joined up.
So let’s see. We have IBM as a Power8 chip maker and Suzhou PowerCore of China as one that is working on its own designs. We have Tyan as a motherboard maker, who presumably is working on motherboards or already has them done. Or, perhaps more comically, Tyan is already a contractor that is making motherboards for Power8 systems that IBM is planning to use. We have Mellanox
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Big Blue’s Chip Business Is Probably On The Block
February 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis rumor, should it turn out to be true, will not come as much of a surprise to IBM i shops that read The Four Hundred. Time and time again, as I have watched IBM‘s quarterly financial results, I have wondered at what point the chip manufacturing business would be too expensive for Big Blue to stay in. We may be approaching that point.
Tongues have been wagging for a long time on this issue, particularly in the wake of IBM’s decision to sell of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion a few
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IBM Pushes Performance Up, Energy Down With Power8
February 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe IEEE hosted its International Solid-State Circuits Conference last week in San Francisco, which is generally loaded with coming out parties for all kinds of server processors. IBM‘s top techies from the Power Systems division were on hand to show off some more of the feeds and speeds of the forthcoming Power8 chips, expected sometime around the middle of this year.
Many of the feeds and speeds of the Power8 chip were divulged last year at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, which The Four Hundred reported on at the time. Some more details of the Power8
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Admin Alert: Saying Goodbye To An Old Power i
February 12, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIBM first introduced Power 7 servers running IBM i on February 8, 2010. So if you leased one of those machines, chances are good that it’s either coming off lease soon or about to come off lease. If you’re ready to say goodbye to an old Power i, here’s seven things to do before you return that old machine to the leasing company.
The Big Seven
There are seven things you need to do before you can return an end-of-lease machine to a leasing company.
- Replace it.
- End the lease.
- End extended maintenance (if relevant).
- Inventory the machine.
- Wipe or
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Four Reasons RPG Geezers Should Care About The New Free-Form RPG
February 12, 2014 Jon Paris
… Read moreBy now you have probably heard that with the latest V7 changes to RPG IV, we can code completely free-form programs. But why should you care? Maybe you saw the benefit of free-form calcs and have been using them for some time, but you still can’t see why you should bother with learning this new way of coding D, F, and P specs. What’s the point? Well, I’m going to share my thoughts on that subject.
On my last birthday, I officially became a geezer (i.e., senior citizen if we want to be polite), so with some 45-plus years of