Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Cacophony Of Many Different Server Markets
September 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Considering how skittery the global economy is, how wonky the world’s supply chains are, and how capricious spending by the big public clouds and the hyperscalers can be (and how much the top eight server buyers in the world make up of the overall market), the fact that the server market only had a 2.5 percent decline in the second quarter is not a surprise.
It’s just the normal noise in the data, and perhaps, if IDC is right, a slight shift away from using two-socket servers with a modest number of cores to single-socket servers with a larger number …
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IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First
September 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After a long, long wait – it has been nearly four years since the first Power9 machine was launched in the “Witherspoon” Power AC922 supercomputing node back in December 2017 based on the 24-core “Nimbus” Power9 processor and just over three years since the high-end “Fleetwood” Power E980 system debuted with the 12-core “Cumulus” Power9 variant – the first machines out of IBM based on the Power10 processor are being unveiled.
The expected three-year cadence between processor generations set by IBM a long time ago has worked out almost precisely for high-end Power Systems shops, with today’s launch of the …
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Forecast: Systems Spending Steady, Up For Services And Software
August 30, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The individual IT budgets at the companies we work at exist in relation to – and often in stark contrast to – the overall market and to companies that are the same size as ours or in the same industry we play in. In this sense, IT spending forecasts from the several major IT market researchers set the pace for expectations, and people being what they are, they are affected (metaphorically speaking) in a relativistic fashion (size warps space and time) and in a quantum fashion (watching an experiment changes it). It gets hard to separate causes from effects in …
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Reliability: An Added Value Of IBM Certified Pre-Owned
August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are many different kinds of reliability that are important in IT infrastructure. There is the obvious one that has to do with the literal quality of the hardware engineering, testing, and manufacturing processes as well as the quality of the systems software that runs atop servers or storage.
But the other kinds of reliability that are equally important is knowing that the manufacturer is standing behind the equipment, supporting it whether it is new or certified pre-owned, in the event that something goes wrong. And as Murphy’s Law tells us and as all system administrators know full well, something …
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The Other IBM Big Iron That Is On The Horizon
August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Hot Chips conference is underway this week, historically at Stanford University but this year as was the case last year, is being done virtually thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. There are a lot of new chips that are being discussed in detail, and one of them is not the forthcoming Power10 chip from IBM, which is expected to make its debut sometime in September and which was one of the hot items at last year’s Hot Chips event.
The one processor that IBM is talking about, however, is the “Telum” z16 processor for System z mainframes, and unlike …
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Balancing Supply And Demand For Impending Big Power10 Iron
August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive …
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Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops
August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.
In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …
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In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …
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No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.
One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …
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The Three Challenges To Securing Your IBM i Platform
July 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever you have to tackle a complex problem, it is best to break it down and then figure out a way to take on the most important and impactful issues first. And when it comes to securing the IBM i platform, nobody knows better than Carol Woodbury, president and chief technology officer at DXR Security, about how to take this “securable” system and lock it down.
Woodbury spent 16 years at IBM from 1984 through 2000, rising to become security team leader for the AS/400 platform and eventually becoming chief engineering manager for security for the platform. After leaving Big …
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