Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Great Resignation Intersects Application Modernization And Digital Transformation
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Depending on how you want to look at it, today is March 680, 2020, or January 10, 2022. It is too early to tell if it is actually a new year or just the penultimate one stretched out unnaturally by biological circumstance. We remain hopeful that 2022 will represent something of a return to normal, but we also know that we can never return to the way things were in 2019. Too many people have had too much time to think about their careers, and a very large number of people are considering job changes or have already jumped ship …
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IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue might have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip fabrication operation to GlobalFoundries many years ago, but that does not mean that the company does not still do a reasonably large amount of fundamental research into chip maker techniques and tricks. Transistor, chip, and packaging research and development is a big portion of the patent portfolio at IBM and continues to be so because Big Blue still has some of the smartest chipheads on the planet working for it because IBM wants to ensure there is a roadmap for future Power and System z processors and because it can …
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How Much Software Budget Does AI Drive?
December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Fake brain-like software based on neural networks is all the rage now, and probably will be for the next decade or so, but you may be surprised at how much money is being spent on software that has some sort of AI embedded in it and also to learn what a small piece of the overall IT market that this AI software represents at this point in IT history.
The market researchers and prognosticators at Gartner recently tried to case the AI software market, and looked at how much money the top five use cases for software that have AI …
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2021 Almost Done, Happy Holidays From IT Jungle To Everyone
December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As far as I can tell, it is really March 654th, 2020 as we bring the 31st volume of The Four Hundred to a close here in what people are still calling 2021 for nostalgia’s sake. We are grateful to have served another year for the IBM i community, and we look forward not only to a well-deserved rest but also to building up some reserves of energy during the holiday season to take on 2022.
By all indications, it looks like 2022 will be an interesting year for the Power Systems platform, with entry and midrange …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: IBM Champion Ash Giddings
December 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe, but not everybody who has worked on an AS/400, iSeries, System i, or IBM i platform is a programmer. Even if they care a great deal about programs and how they run on the boxes. Ash Giddings, who is an IBM Champion in 2021 and a newly appointed product manager at high availability software provider Maxava, is one such chap, and we got an opportunity to have a chat with Giddings about what is going on with performance management, systems management, disaster recovery, and high availability out there in the IBM i base.
Like …
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Supply Chain Problems Cause Power Systems SAS Controller Shortage
December 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The coronavirus pandemic has been doing strange things to the world’s supply chains for nearly two years now, and all things considered, the Power Systems platform has been largely spared from any serious issues. Until now.
We have just caught wind of a notice that Tech Data has sent out to all of its Power Systems business partners that IBM has plenty of SAS disk drives and SAS flash drives, but that “demand currently exceeds supply availability” for SAS controllers and SAS backplanes. The shortage just hit hard in the past week or so, and now orders that have SAS …
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IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices
December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.
In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …
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The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080
November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.
These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …
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A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades
November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.
The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …
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Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time
November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.
But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …
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