Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Integrated Systems Drove $1.2 Billion In Sales In Q2, Says IDC
October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt isn’t just vendors that are talking about integrated systems that converge servers, networking, and storage into a single system. It looks like customers are doing some buying, too.
According to the latest market research by IDC, sales of integrated infrastructure platforms like IBM’s PureSystems machines drove $1.32 billion in revenues in the second quarter, up 50.2 percent from the year-ago period. IDC has just started tracking sales of integrated infrastructure and integrated platform sales, the latter having a higher software component and usually being tuned for specific workloads. In the IBM lineup, the former is technically called a
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Big Blue PowerVC, SmartCloud Entry Provisioning For IBM i
October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM put out a new tool called PowerVC, which is short for Virtualization Center and which is a new management tool to set up and manage virtual machines on top of the PowerVM hypervisor.
Earlier this year, IBM committed to porting the KVM hypervisor to Power processors and also making the OpenStack cloud controller work in conjunction with the Power Systems, and PowerVC is one of several new products that are coming to market based on these efforts.
In announcement letter 213-409, you will see that what IBM has done is
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IBM Peddles Another 2,000 PureSystems Machines
October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe ramp of IBM‘s PureSystems converged machines continues apace, with the company growing its installed base of unique systems by 25 percent in the third quarter ended in September.
“PureSystems continues to gain momentum,” said Mark Loughridge, IBM’s chief financial officer, on a call with Wall Street analysts going over the third quarter financial result for IBM. “In the major markets, we grew more than 30 percent sequentially. Globally, we shipped over 2,000 systems in third quarter, with over 8,000 total shipments since announcement.”
Depending on who I ask, and when I ask them, a PureSystems system is a
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Power Systems Sales Hammered Down In Q3
October 21, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhat happens–or doesn’t happen–in China has a much larger effect on IBM i shops in the rest of the world than perhaps any of us might have anticipated. The return to profitability for IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group in the second quarter was short-lived and the group was pushed into a loss in the third quarter by a freeze on spending in China. Economic growth in the Middle Kingdom is the weakest it has been since 2000, and the government of President Xi Jinping has been working since May to put together reforms and a stimulus package. Those reforms
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The Digital Industrial Economy To Shake Up The IT Biz
October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe wizards at Gartner held their annual Symposium/ITExpo extravaganza last week in Orlando, Florida, and as usual, the whitebeards in the pointy hats are trying to get CIOs excited about their prognostications.
First and foremost. Peter Sondergaard, a senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research at the company, assured everyone that the global IT market would grow by 3.6 percent to $3.8 trillion. But this, apparently is not where the action is. The “Internet of Things” as analysts and vendors are starting to call it, is what is really hot, according to Sondergaard.
The basic gist of
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IBM Is Winding Down Sales Of More Power7 Machines
October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the Power7+ processors in full swing and the Power8 chips around the corner in 2014, it will come as no surprise to anyone that Big Blue wants to start winding down sales of Power7 processors. The Power7 chips, which made their debut in February 2010 and which were gradually rolled out into the Power Systems line that year, are still both technically viable and, provided you get a good price for a system using one, are also economically viable.
That said, the way per-core IBM i pricing works, it always makes more sense to have the fastest processor possible
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looksoftware’s iBelieve Event Tours Europe
October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreApplication modernization software maker looksoftware is taking its iBelieve show on the road, and this time it is doing a five-city tour of Europe to promote the IBM i platform and the applications that run on it. The company has held numerous iBelieve events in the United States and Australia and wants to keep the momentum going by pushing into Europe.
Frank Soltis, the former chief scientist for the AS/400, iSeries, and System i platforms, will be on hand at the iBelieve events to talk about the Power Systems-IBM i platform and its future. Industry gadfly and good guy Trevor
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Power Enterprise Pools Make CPU Activations Mobile
October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM is allowing for core activations to move easily across a group of machines. This new feature, called Power Enterprise Pools, is only aimed at high-end machines, but a credible argument can be made that it should be available on all Power-based systems.
IBM has allowed for customers with multiple big Power Systems machines to work with its tech support organization to allow for processor activations to be transferred from one box to another with a complex manual process, Steve Sibley, director of worldwide product management for IBM’s Power Systems, explains. But
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Little Linux Pricing On Big Power Systems Iron
October 14, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn case you haven’t noticed, IBM thinks that getting customers to put their Linux workloads onto Power Systems is going to reverse the sales decline for the platform. That decline has more to do with all flavors of Unix falling out of favor compared to Windows and Linux in the data centers of the world with the exception of very large workloads, usually databases, and the relatively high prices that Unix system vendors charge for their iron.
In a way, Unix is the new proprietary platform and Linux is the lower-priced upstart, echoing the situation when Unix first became tame
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Admin Alert: A Primer For Setting Up PC5250 SSL Connectivity, Part 1
October 9, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreTo better secure your IBM i Access for Windows connections (Access for Windows), you may be required to encrypt your PC5250 Telnet sessions using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. If you need SSL encryption for your PC5250 setups, here’s a primer for setting up your IBM i and PC clients to communicate via SSL certificates.
The Overview
Setting up Telnet SSL connectivity between your PCs and your IBM i partition requires you to perform the following configuration steps in your IBM i Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), your network, and on your PCs running IBM i Access for Windows.
On your