Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IDC Says Server Sales Up As Shipments Go Down In Q4
March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere has never been one server business, but rather many. Each new wave of technology that has come out over the past five decades is lingering on, in upgraded form, as new system architectures are introduced and enter the market like a tidal wave, toppling down what used to be conventional architectures. Sometimes, those conventional architectures become the waves, as happed with a spike in IBM mainframe sales in the final quarter of 2012.
According to the box counters at IDC, System z mainframe sales (including a base z/OS operating system on newly shipped or upgraded machines) were up
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Reader Feedback On Sundry Recent Stories
March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFeedback on Entry Power7+ Servers: Counting The Costs Of CPUs, IBM i, And SWMA
Hey, TPM:
You hit the head on the nail with the article on Power 7+ pricing. As you know, we perform hundreds of capacity plans and on the low end it is always the same questions we are trying to answer.
1. Do I need more than eight disk arms for performance? I would say that in 95 percent of the cases, the anwser is yes, which means the 710, 730, and the four-core 720 are not an option.
2. We also answer the question of:
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Big Blue Backs Off On IBM i Maintenance Price Hike
March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWell you lose some, and every now and then, you win some. Or more precisely, we all win some. Back in the February 25 issue of The Four Hundred, I told you about an announcement buried deep in Big Blue’s February 5 Power Systems announcements that had some pretty steep price increases for selected features of the IBM i operating system. Well, on March 11, IBM rescinded that price increase, after what I presume was a lot of complaints from customers, business partners, and wiseguys like me.
As I explained nearly a month ago, these IBM price change announcement
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Entry Power7+ Servers: How IBM Sees The Deal
March 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe’ve been going through the feeds and speeds, slots and watts, and dollars and sense of the new entry Power7+ processors to help you sort out what machines might be in your future and what kind of dough you will have to come up with to get there. It takes lots of points of view to make a proper landscape, and this week, I’ll take a look into the analysis that IBM has done for business partners to give them a starting point when they are peddling the new Power7+ entry servers to customers.
The Power 710+ and Power 730+
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IBM Picks OpenStack To Control Future SmartClouds
March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue’s Systems and Technology Group was working on clouds many, many years ago, and because there were no open source alternatives out there, it came up with its own SmartCloud Entry cloud controller, a program that can wrestle with X86 and Power servers and their hypervisors and boss them around as they move workloads around a pool of servers. But now that OpenStack, an open source cloud controller created initially by NASA and Rackspace Hosting more than two years ago is mature, IBM has decided it is time to put that tool at the heart of its future
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Oracle Revamps Its Database Appliance Server For Midrange Shops
March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf Oracle wants to take on IBM and others down in the midrange peddling database appliance servers–well, when you get right down to it, that is what an IBM i platform is–it has to do more than try to sell big and expensive Exadata parallel and flash-enhanced clusters. That is why Big Larry crafted the Oracle Database Appliance 18 months ago. Last week, Oracle put out an improved design with beefed up X86 processors and significantly expanded storage.
And if IBM is paying attention, it will offer a similar configuration running IBM i designed specifically to protect its base of
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Reader Feedback On Those 720+ and 740+ Boxes Are Gonna Cost Ya
March 11, 2013 Hey, TPM
… Read moreThe thing about the four-core processors in the 710+ and 720+ is that they are P05 software group machines. To keep them “small” IBM has fixed them so that they don’t support ANY external disk apart from SAN-attach and no external I/O towers either. This is clearly deliberate because–as we both know–most customers with a traditional IBM i workload don’t need more than four cores but they surely do need more disk space than you can squeeze into a single system chassis and more performance, too. Unless you go to SSDs, of course. 🙂
And there’s another kick in the
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Server Manufacturing Moved Out Of Rochester, Minnesota
March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMany of us who follow the IBM systems business have been predicting this day might come for many years and then talking ourselves into thinking it would not happen. But the day finally came on March 5. That was when the top brass of Big Blue’s Systems and Technology Group held a meeting with employees of the Rochester, Minnesota, facility that gave birth to the System/3 in 1969 and successor technologies that culminated in the Power Systems and now PureSystems lines, telling them that they would no longer be making commercial systems at the legendary facility.
It is not clear
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Entry Power7+ Servers: Counting The Costs Of CPUs, IBM i, And SWMA
March 11, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the pricing of configured systems in the new Power7+ entry models that were announced on February 5. There are some interesting and useful comments on the data I put together showing the cost and performance of configured Power 710+, 720+, 730+, and 740+ boxes, which you can read about here. I only looked at hardware pricing in last week’s issue, and this week I want to give you a sense of what the new machines cost when you load up IBM i and Software Maintenance tech
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Admin Alert: A Checklist For Moving Power i Partitions To A Different Location
March 6, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreWith corporate buy-outs, company spin-offs, and moving Power i servers to a centralized data center or a managed server provider, many shops are finding that they need to move their Power i partitions to a different network or a cloud provider. To that end, here’s a checklist I put together to help ensure that your Power i partitions can function without issue in a new environment.
Why We Move
There are many reasons you might need a playbook for moving a Power i partition from one location and network to another. Some of the more common situations include:
- Company sale