Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems Revenues Look To Grow In 2022
October 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It was a pretty good third quarter for Big Blue on many fronts if you overlook a $5.76 billion writedown as it has transferred some of its pension obligations for retired employees to a third party to get them off its books forever. This is the second straight quarter that, ignoring this massive hit to the books, which was actually offset by some tax benefits IBM cashed in at the same time, the company has shown both revenue and profit growth.
This may not be the IBM of our salad days, but it is a far cry better from the …
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Survey Says: You Need To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that occurs every autumn is open, and time is running out for you to have your voice be heard and your IBM i shop to be counted. And so we are asking you to please take a moment – you can even stop reading The Four Hundred to do it, so long as you come back and finish reading.
This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst
October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.
Hal Schwartz, president at CloudFirst, got a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University in San Bernardino back in 1988, and worked in sales at CAC Leasing outside of New York City before starting his own leasing company, called …
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Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks
October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.
In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …
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Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates
October 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.
In announcement letter 222-279, we find the usual agglomeration of updates to the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the virtual Hardware Management Console, and the Cloud Management Console.
With PowerVM, IBM wanted to …
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It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry
October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.
And so, back in 2014, IBM …
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Integrated Does Not Have To Mean Included And Invoiced
October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In this era of “pay for what you eat” cloud computing – maybe they should have called it “buffet computing” after all because there sure as hell is nothing cloudy about the bill when it comes – it seems odd that customers can’t pick a la carte the things they want and they don’t want in a system that nonetheless has all of its myriad components and services integrated.
Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated, with one throat to choke (for the most part) when things go wrong. We are strong believers in …
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Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud
October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.
For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …
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The IBM i Marketplace Survey Is Open For You
October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
How many times a day do people tell you what you know matters? Well, it does, and I am telling you. But that knowledge of your IBM i environment is not doing anyone any good, stuck inside of your noggin. To get a realistic sense of what is actually going on out there in IBM i Land, we need you to pipe up.
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and will be for a few more weeks. But we don’t want you to wait until the last minute to participate. Please …
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IBM i 7.3 Loses Standard Support On September 30, 2023
October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue just got the IBM i 7.5 operating system and system software stack out the door for Power9 and Power10 machines back in May, and from that moment the clock was ticking on regular support for the IBM i release that came out in April 2016 and that represents the second most popular release on primary machines based on data from the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey.
Most operating system makers – there are not that many of them left in the datacenter these days – offer standard support for their releases and versions for seven years …
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