Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Cloud Infrastructure Spending Growing, But More Slowly
May 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you look at financials, you need to think quarterly year on year to get a sense of growth over the annual and often seasonal business cycles that drive the economy. And then you also need to think sequentially so you can see when something that is growing on its own momentum, as cloud computing has been doing for the better part of a decade, shifts to a more seasonal flow.
With the latest market figures released from hyperscaler and cloud watcher Synergy Research, whose chief analyst and managing director is John Dinsdale, dices and slices the public view of …
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Technology Always Replaces People While Augmenting Others
May 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there is one rule of technology, it is that technology always replaces some people while augmenting others. And like religion and politics or how much money you make, it was not discussed in polite company. With the advent of machine learning-driven AI and the modern and often impolite world it was born into, this may not be the case anymore. People are talking. IBM among them.
When IBM launched the System/360 mainframe in April 1964, it was a transformative thing for what was yet to become the computer industry. Early on, with the advent of data store and database …
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OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops
May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …
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IBM Updates Performance Guide For Latest Power10 Iron
May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
No matter what system you are talking about, no matter what kind of applications you are running, there are always ways to squeeze more performance out of the system. The IBM i platform running atop Power10 and earlier processors is no exception, and to that end, for several years now Big Blue has provided some guidance on pushing performance with each new CPU family and as new features are added to the OS/400 and IBM i software stack.
The latest such update, according to Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i platform, has just been published, and you can …
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An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023
April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.
And work, of course. …
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Storage Helps Power Systems Grow In The First Quarter
April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is a peculiar thing: It is almost like there are two different Power Systems customer sets. Those that spend big in the second quarter and fourth quarter of every year and those that spend less big in the first and third quarters of every year.
While we understand the normal Q4 bump that happens because there are decades of traditions, founded on good budgetary and capacity planning practices, we are a bit perplexed why when it comes to the Power Systems market at least, Q2 is almost as good revenue-wise as the prior Q4. We admit fully that this …
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A Common Market, A Common Currency, A Common Theme
April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It seems like forever since I went to a COMMON midrange user group, and yes, I know it is called PowerUp 2023 and I know everyone shouts POWER in their POWERUp but I don’t. When someone SHOUTS IN THIS NEWSLETTER, I want you to see it. Marketeers don’t get to change the way language and typography works just because they have a love of ransom notes.
I am very much looking forward to going to PowerUp, even though I am not all that excited to drive from Boone at 3:30 a.m. in the morning to catch a 6:30 a.m. boarding …
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The Downshifting Of IT Spending Growth Continues Apace
April 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The central banks of the world don’t have a lot of levers to pull to change the behavior of the national and regional economies that they control. But when they raise interest rates, there is a predictable triple-whammy impact on the economy. Companies start cutting costs, including people, and those who don’t lose their jobs curtail spending just in case they might or in case the economy will slow, and the cost of borrowing money goes up and that dampens demand for big ticket items like houses and cars, which feeds back into the economy.
And thus, it is no …
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Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance
April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.
PerfScan is the first product – and …
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Direct Attached Storage Gets Massive NVM-Express Expansion
April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The storage area network – a giant wonking storage server with lots of lossless Fibre Channel switching between servers that share access to virtual storage partitions – has been around for several decades now. And despite all of the talk of its ubiquity, and usefulness in driving up storage utilization across a bunch of servers and therefore helping drive down the cost of that storage while also enhancing its manageability and shareability, for many IBM i shops, using directly attached storage is what they want to do.
There are reasons for this, of course. In many cases, the IBM i …
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