Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale
August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …
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Sticking To The Backroads On This Journey
August 7, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Things are getting progressively weird in the computer business, and with lots of travel over the past two weeks up and down the East coast for vacation and for visiting family, I have had a lot of time to think about things. It’s so weird that I really don’t want to play the radio. I just want to keep us safe on the highways and have my thoughts. Parse a few things, suss them out, see how they might fit together and in what particular configuration.
Because time is of the essence, I have been largely on the interstates, but …
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You Guessed It: AI Will Drive Cloud Adoption
July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What do you think will be the quickest way to try out AI extensions to applications? Will it be trying to get your hand on models, tweaking them with your data, and then integrating the AI extensions with your own applications? Or will it be trying out a SaaS-style AI tool where all of the work is done? Or better still, moving to a SaaS application that has AI in it from the get-go?
It will be no doubt the latter two options. And this, as much as any other force, is going to hasten the shift for certain workloads …
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IBM i Work Problem Feature Unemployed For Software Faults
July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the true differentiations of the AS/400 platform launched 35 years ago was Electronic Customer Support, which at the time involved remote diagnostics and the ability of the machine to reach out over a modem – remember, there was no commercial Internet yet – to connect directly to IBM and report problems as they were happening.
After three and a half decades, there are a lot of different components and features of the IBM i-Power Systems Electronic Customer Support (ECS) and Electronic Service Agent (ESA) customer care services, way beyond what was available in the original ECS. But recently, …
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Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services
July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.
The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM …
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Big Blue’s New “WebSpheres” To Surf The Container And AI Waves
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Without question, there is a lot of money that can be made on AI training and inference, as is aptly shown by the financial results of Nvidia. That company, which is the darling of Wall Street these days, has gone from datacenter wannabe to datacenter giant in the course of a decade and a half. It has been fascinating to watch, but it is as much the result of lucky timing as hard work, as Jensen Huang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, admitted from the beginning.
Nvidia has been working on parallel computing architectures for accelerating HPC workloads …
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Power Systems Down A Bit, But Holding Steady In Q2
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Considering that we are over a year into the Power10 entry and midrange server upgrade cycle, and almost two years into the Power10 high-end cycle, the fact that the Power Systems server business is only down a few points in the second quarter is, well, normal. As in the old normal where things have a natural ebb and flow and the business is not just in a kind of 45 degree decline like we saw a decade ago.
This is what happens when Big Blue sticks to its enterprise computing knitting and is not distracted by the money-losing proposition of …
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The Last Power8 Machine Gets End Of Service Notice
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in November 2022, amongst a slew of other machinery, customers using the vast majority of the Power Systems servers based on the Power8 processor were warned that IBM was cutting off its maintenance and support for these machines effective between March and October 2024. That may sound like a long time from now, but it really isn’t when you have to hustle a system upgrade, complete with application software, through the budgetary and testing hoops.
We wrote about those Power8 system withdrawals here, and in case you need to dig out the notice again, the new IBM Documentation system …
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A Slew Of Power Systems Features Are Being Sunsetted
July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has long since stopped selling Power8 machinery and has been winding down sales of Power9-based systems as its Power10 machines, which made their debut in late 2021 and early 2022, are ascending. So, it is natural that features for Power8 and Power9 machinery are being withdrawn. But even some features with the newer Power10 machines are also being withdrawn, in some cases because supplies are running out and in other cases because better features have been introduced.
You have to keep up with these things so you can get what you need before IBM stops selling whatever that …
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The Majority Of Large Enterprises To Boost IT Staff This Year
July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The sample is small, the data is a little bit musty, but the news is good.
Back in October and November last year, the market researchers at Gartner did a survey of chief information officers at large enterprises and 501 people responded from all over the world; 182 of them were from North America, Europe/Africa/Middle East, and Asia/Pacific, which means by definition that Central America and South America were over-represented a bit in the survey. So take these results with a grain of salt, and maybe some pepper.
By Gartner’s definition, a large enterprise is one with $1 billion or …
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