Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Server Partners Get Extra Incentives, IBM i Scores Another Supply Chain Win
March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM hosted its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas last week, and there was lots of talk about cloud, mobile, and big data, as is the case with everything Blue and Big these days. But IBM wanted to give a couple of shouts out to the partners in who peddle products that come out of its Systems and Technology Group, and outlined a number of actions it was taking specifically to help partners push more Power Systems and PureSystems iron.
Specifically, IBM told partners that it would:
- Increase its dedicated channel sales and technical sales specialists by 50 percent in
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Reader Feedback On Big Blue Jacks SWMA For IBM i, Application RISC Machine System/500
March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHi, Timothy:
What I am guessing IBM is referring to in your story, Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i, with the “45 other products” covered by SWMA are the Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that most i clients use. It is rare for a machine running a business app to not use a combination of WebSphere Development Studio, iSeries Access, Query/400, SQL Kit, Performance Tools, BRMS, etc. However IBM does not charge extra maintenance for these products.
Compare that to a Windows or Unix system, where you have to buy all these features as standalone products from
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The Server Racket Holds Its Own In The Fourth Quarter
March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe server business is sputtering a bit with the economic uncertainty out there, but it has, at least according to the numbers coming out of Gartner last week, put the Great Recession a few miles back in the rear view mirror and is holding its own despite all of the wrenching changes going on in the data center these days. We may be witnessing another big wave of a virtualization of another kind, where new applications don’t end up in our own data centers, but in someone else’s, and therefore some of the server sales shift from your data center
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Power7 Is The End Of The Line For Power Blades
March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you were hoping to see Power7+ processors in blade servers later this year to build out your existing BladeCenter infrastructure, I have some bad news for you. As I had been suspecting with my newsy-sense (not as good as spidey sense, but it keeps me employed just as that sixth sense keeps Spiderman alive), IBM has no plans to put the shiny Power7+ processors into the existing PS700 through PS704 series of blade servers.
I had been guessing that Big Blue might cut off the BladeCenters with the Power7+ or Power8 generations, especially given the launch of the Flex
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Entry Power7+ Servers: Those 720+ and 740+ Boxes Are Gonna Cost Ya
March 4, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLet me give you a piece of advice. If your IBM i workloads are such that they are compute intensive but not data intensive, and you can cram all of the peripherals you need into a 2U rack server, such as the chassis used with the new Power 710+ and Power 730+ servers, then you most assuredly should do so. Because the expandability inherent in the 4U rack or tower enclosures used with the Power 720+ and Power 740+ servers, including the ability to hang lots of external disk off the box, are going to cost you.
I have come
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Sony Ditches Power For PlayStation 4, And This Matters To IBM i
February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreConsumer electronics maker Sony gave a sneak peek at its forthcoming PlayStation 4 game console, expected in time for Christmas shopping seven years after the release of the Power-based PlayStation 3. The company did not say much about the technology inside of the new game console, but one thing we know for sure: Power is out, and X86 processing and GPU graphics from Advanced Micro Devices is in.
The feeds and speeds of the new PlayStation 4 are not all that impressive: an eight-core “Jaguar” processor with an integrated Radeon graphics chip from AMD, the kind of thing you might
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Cisco And EMC Chase Midrange Customers With Smaller Converged Systems
February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is not the only one chasing midrange shops with converged systems. Last week, the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco Systems and EMC rolled out a new line of Vblock converged systems that the companies hope with help is radically expand its channel and then its customer base.
The VCE partnership, which also includes server virtualization juggernaut VMware (which is majority-owned by EMC and therefore no matter what anyone says, this is still an EMC-Cisco partnership), stacks up Cisco’s C Series rack servers and Catalyst 3750-X switches, EMC’s VNXe 3150 disk arrays, VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Plus server virtualization stack,
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IBM Locks Down Licensed Internal Code On Power, Mainframe Systems
February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere we go again. Maybe. Or maybe not, if IBM‘s lawyers help it close the barn door before the horse escapes. Big Blue is tightening down the licensing of the machine code, often called licensed internal code or microcode, for selected high-end servers based on Power and System z processors. IBM has 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 on the dotted line a license acceptance agreement.
IBM announced the new
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Big Blue Jacks Software Maintenance Prices For IBM i
February 25, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI hate to tell you I told you so. No, really, I do. I didn’t want to be right about this. And as is the case with all prognostication, I was only partially right, so really, I didn’t want to cop to only being partly right. Back in January, in the lead story for the first issue of this year, it was reasonable to expect a maintenance price hike in 2013 on vintage System i and not-so-shiny Power Systems iron. There has indeed been a maintenance price hike, but it was on IBM i software, not IBM hardware.
See,
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Getting Short-Term Maintenance For Your Power i Machine
February 20, 2013 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI purchased a three-year maintenance contract when I bought my Power7 machine in 2010. The contract runs out in May but I need extended maintenance through July when I’m installing a new machine and returning the old machine to the leasing company. How do I extend my hardware/software maintenance for only two months without having to buy a one-year maintenance contract?
–Jean
This is a fairly common situation and one that IBM provides an out for in their maintenance contracts. Here’s how you can sign a one- or multi-year maintenance contract for your existing machine and then cancel the contract