Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Licenses Power8 Chips To Chinese Startup
January 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAhead of its reporting of disappointing system sales last week and the announcement that it was selling off its X86 server business to Lenovo, IBM also announced a new partnership in China that will see a startup funded by a provincial government and other industrial players make its own variants of the Power processors for servers.
The startup, called Suzhou PowerCore, is a sister company to an existing Power chip licensee called China Core, or C*Core for short. The companies share the same CEO, Jiang Zheng, but they will operate separately. Suzhou PowerCore has joined IBM’s OpenPower Consortium and
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Reader Feedback: Finding The i In The Power Ecosystem And Strategy
January 27, 2014 Hey, Dan
… Read moreFirst, thanks for writing up the interview. It’s always interesting to see what IBM‘s marketing people believe versus what I see from a customer perspective.
Terri Virnig indicates that we can tell IBM is dedicated to investing in the platform because they posted a graphic indicating they would like to continue supporting the platform beyond 2020. However, I read the news, and I see continued layoffs of the development team behind IBM i. When I discuss new features with developers, I’m told about budget constraints and requests being bumped back into the OS release that comes after 7.2.
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Power Systems Sales Power Down In The Fourth Quarter
January 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTaking over the helm of a giant such as IBM is never easy, and like many company leaders, Ginni Rometty, who has been in charge of Big Blue for the past two years, took over just as massive change was sweeping the industry. The way infrastructure is built, bought, and sold is changing, and IBM is taking more than its share of hits at the moment. That could mean IBM is a canary in the coal mine, being affected by change ahead of its peers. Or that its strategy and products are misaligned to the market.
I don’t have enough
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What The System x Selloff Means To IBM i Shops
January 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs has been rumored for nearly a year and suspected for the past five years by many of us, IBM has finally gone and done it and sold off its System x server business to Lenovo Group for $2.3 billion. The details of the deal are complex, and there is no guarantee that the U.S. government will approve it, but given the strong presence that Lenovo has in North Carolina by virtue of its acquisition of IBM’s PC business in late 2004, the odds favor the nod from Uncle Sam.
With that move, Lenovo becomes the number three shipper of
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IBM Cuts Flash Copy Tags For Storwize V5000
January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe midrange Storwize V5000 disk and flash arrays were just announced last November, aimed at small and midrange shops who need more than a V3700 but don’t need a full-on V7000. And IBM is already tweaking pricing on some of its features.
In particular, in announcement letter 314-002, you can see that IBM has cut tags on nine different feature codes relating to the Storwize software for this V5000 machine. IBM doesn’t ever tell you the description of the features with the price changes, which is maddening. But that’s why you have me. So, here is the chart of
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IBM Rules The Patent Roost For 21 Years Straight
January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf patents were money, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office would be rolling in it. But wait. . . . Patents are money, in a way, and they are just as surreal and real as Bitcoin. You make some intellectual investment and you get the right to commercialize an invention and prevent others from doing so.
Last year, the USPTO issued a whopping 277,835 utility patents, a record number for the U.S. government. Utility patents cover machines or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or physical in nature, while design patents cover the shape of objects and their ornamentation. For many
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IBM Gets EMEA Integrators And ISVs To Push Power Systems
January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations wants to peddle more Power iron, and it is working with the reseller and software application vendor community to give business partners and systems integrators a piece of the action if they work with solution providers to close deals.
Specifically, in announcement letter ZA14-1004, the 2014 Power ISV Solution Connection Program is giving said business partner and system integrator companies rebates that range from $500 to $3,000. Here is what the rebate schedule looks like:
As you can see, the bigger the box, the bigger the rebate. Moreover, you will notice that
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IBM Broadens Power Systems SAS Adapters
January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a long time since the Power 795 was first introduced, and the machine is getting a bit long in the tooth with the Power8 systems looming for initial delivery sometime around the middle of this year. But IBM needs to keep trying to push these high-end, and presumably very profitable machines. Last November, IBM cut the prices on processors and main memory for the Power 795, and now the company is offering new SAS controllers aimed at grafting flash storage and recent LTO tape drives onto the big bad boxes.
In announcement letter 113-010, IBM is
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IBM Winds Down Older CPU And Memory Ahead Of Power8
January 20, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the new year, and Big Blue is prepping for the Power8 system launch as well as updates to the IBM i and sometime around the middle of the year. IBM likes to give customers plenty of warning when there is a maintenance price hike or when it will be withdrawing certain processors and features from the market, and last week it fired off the first announcement of 2014 that shows the company is gearing up for Power8.
Expect more announcements, perhaps better deals to encourage customers to move up to Power7+ machines rather than wait for the Power8
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Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 2
January 15, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreIn December, I began discussing four different approaches for moving an IBM i partition from an existing machine to a new location and the different tasks needed for each technique. I talked about using traditional system back-up and restore migration techniques last issue. This issue, I’ll focus on using high availability (HA) software to migrate a partition.
Four Ways To Move An IBM i
To review, there are four techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a different machine:
- Restore the partition in place or to a new location using the same system name. This is a traditional restore