Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
IBM To Stop Unencrypted Fix Downloads In February
November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have caught word from the IBM business partner community that starting on February 15, 2023, Big Blue will stop allowing customers to get operating system software patches that are not encrypted.
The notification, which you can see here, was sent to business partners on November 23, just before the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. Various IBM support methods, including IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD), IBM Electronic Customer Care (ECC), and IBM Fix Central are all affected by this change.
“Many leaders of the internet industry – such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task …
Read more -
IBM Sets Maintenance Withdrawal On Power8 Iron For 2024
November 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All good things come to an end, and so it is with the Power8-based Power Systems machines. With the Power10 machines in full swing, it is no surprise that IBM is getting set to completely wind down its sales and support of these vintage Power8 systems. Sales have been winding down for the past year, and now Big Blue is warning that maintenance services will expire in 2024.
Rather than set a single date for all machines to have their maintenance agreements and support expire all at once, IBM has three different dates on which maintenance will come to an …
Read more -
Court Throws Out Lawsuit From Chinese Power Systems Partner Against Big Blue
November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not often that we get any insight into the geopolitical workings of the Power Systems business that is central to this publication and to all of you who work on the IBM i platform. Often, the only way we learn anything is when two parties sue each other in court. Such is the case with the lawsuit filed against Big Blue back in September 2021 by Beijing Neu Cloud Oriental System Technology. The lawsuit, as it turns out, was tossed out of court last week.
China has presented as many challenges as it has opportunities for all …
Read more -
A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends
November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.
First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.
When …
Read more -
IBM Gives Temporary Reprieve For Power8 Core And Memory Activations
November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue is pretty generous when it comes to having features for past generations of machines available for purchase, even when they are two generations back from whatever it is currently selling. But sooner or later, IBM wants to sell the new machines and it stops selling the old stuff. Even if it is only processor and memory activations on machines that are already in the field, which is the easiest sale in the world because IBM doesn’t really have to do much.
This may be the most profitable kind of sale that Big Blue does, but sooner or later, …
Read more -
The Rich Parfait That Is Cloud Spending
November 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Most IBM i shops are so used to having an integrated system that runs their mission critical systems of record and some of their systems of engagement and Web infrastructure workloads, too, that they may forget that the rest of the world does not always experience their IT in this relatively monolithic way.
The top 50,000 or so organizations in the world tend to take a best-of-breed approach to every application and its underlying layers of infrastructure, so they have a hodge-podge of stuff. The next million or so organizations have to be more conservative and keep the infrastructure diversity …
Read more -
Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud
November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.
We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …
Read more -
The Numbers For Global IT Spending Are Up And To The Right
November 2, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say how much is an increase in investment and how much is inflation, but the numbers for global IT spending are up and to the right, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. For those of you who gauge your spending against that of the rest of the world – and that should be all of you for various reasons – such spending forecasts are as important as they are malleable.
It is hard enough to try to count all of the money changing hands around the world for hardware, software, and services relating to the …
Read more -
Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O
October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.
Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:
“IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …
Read more -
It’s Your IBM i Marketplace, And This Is Also Your Survey
October 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are coming into the home stretch of the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. That means time is running out for you to participate and have your voice heard and your IBM i shop to counted. And as we have been doing for the past couple of weeks, we are once – and finally –asking you to take a moment and take the survey.
This survey was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, and the data that it gathers is invaluable. Like other members in the IBM i community, …
Read more