Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Spending On Legacy Systems Stalls In Q1, 2023 Forecast Looks Weak
July 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Neither Gartner nor IDC put out their quarterly server and storage reports for the public anymore, but IDC does still release a converged dataset that adds server and storage spending together and carves it up based on if it is spend on the clouds or for traditional – what we would call legacy – systems. The latest results are out for the first quarter of 2023, and there is what looks like a temporary stall in legacy system spending and it looks like it is going to get worse here in 2023 but return to growth in the coming years. …
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Big Blue Offers Cheaper Standard Shipping For IBM i Systems
July 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Since the dawn of time, one kind of shipping and handling was bundled into the price of AS/400 and successor systems. But that has just changed. Now, Big Blue is offering two tiers of shipping and handling for machinery it ships to customers, including Power Systems servers and current in its IBM Storage lineup of tape, disk, and flash products – and it is giving the customers a choice on how they want things shipped and therefore what price they will pay.
This change was inevitable, and frankly, given the high costs of shipping anything these days, it is amazing …
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Integrate 2023, The Lyrics
June 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When I was at the POWERUp conference in Denver back in late April along with my co-editor, Alex Woodie, we were sitting in the opening keynote address when Alison Butterill, IBM i offering manager, and Steve Will, IBM i chief architect, were on stage talking about the AS/400 launch and how the platform has evolved over time, there was a point in the presentation when a slide went up that listed some of the key features of the platform. I remember seeing “Innovate” and “Integrate” at the top of the list, and that sent my brain down an internal monologue …
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Talking System Architecture With The Frank Soltis
June 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a very funny way, the System/38 and its AS/400 and following progeny are the product of coincidence and brilliance. In 1962, had Frank Soltis taken that summer job at an aerospace company that he wanted to work for in Southern California, first of all, he might have ended up with a tan, and second of all, whatever followed the System/34 almost certainly would not have had single level storage, much less the architecture that we still know today, in modified form, as the IBM i platform.
Lucky for us that Frank’s father, who ran a parts distribution operation for …
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Happy Coral Anniversary, System/36 And System/38!
June 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The AS/400 is the product of the marriage of the System/36 and the System/38 that had its first child delivered on June 21, 1988. So, to one way of thinking about it, the AS/400 is not just celebrating its 35th birthday this week, but the System/36 and the System/38 are celebrating their Coral Anniversary. The rules of etiquette say that we have to send IBM Rochester something carved in jade to celebrate.
The AS/400, which lives on as the IBM i platform running on Power10 hardware, is neither stuck on a coral reef nor jaded, but just going …
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Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance
June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.
The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …
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How Does Your Infrastructure Spending Stack Up To The World?
June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As IT analysts, as well as IT journalists, we believe that the economic questions of how many widgets consumed, how much revenue and profit do they generate, and how fast are markets changing and evolving as new widgets come and old widgets go are just as important as the feeds, speeds, slots, and watts of any particular widgetry.
That is why we have always looked at both sets of IT data over time, to get a 3-D feel for the market and its flows of hardware, software, and services across workloads. It is very rare when one of the market …
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Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM
May 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Earlier this week, we told you about a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when running on Power9 and Power10 systems. IBM found the vulnerability itself and immediately set about to patch the vulnerability, which it revealed on May 17 along with patches to firmware in systems that are managed by the Hardware Management Console, or HMC.
What was not necessarily apparent was that there are plenty of Power Systems customers who do not have HMCs managing their systems and the logical partitions upon them, and this is particularly true of the IBM i installed base, which …
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Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM Hypervisor
May 22, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) put out a notice on Wednesday, May 17, to inform the Power Systems installed base that there is a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor. You can see the PSIRT notice at this link and the Security Bulletin: This Power System firmware update is being released to address CVE 2023-30438 at this link. This has a CVSS base score of 9.3, which means it is critical.
We very rarely see any security vulnerabilities being reported for the PowerVM hypervisor or for the IBM i operating system itself, for that matter, …
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The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin
May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.
The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …
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