Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Grows, Power Systems Slows
April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The good news, if you are a customer of IBM who wants Big Blue to stick around in the systems business, is that IBM actually saw some growth in its overall business for the first time in two years. This growth was driven in large part by its System z mainframe line, in the first quarter of 2021. The less than good news – but not unexpected – is that the Power Systems business continued to shrink as customers await high-end Power10 systems later this year and low-end Power10 machines early next year.
In the quarter ended in March, IBM’s …
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IBM Tweaks Power Systems Hardware Here And There
April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
First of all, our apologies for taking so long to get to the hardware roundup from the April 13 Power Systems announcements, which brought us new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4. There were a few changes to the hardware lineup as well, and let’s go through them now.
As you can see from announcement letter 121-013, IBM has done a refresh on the 2.5-inch flash drives used in the Power9-based server line. According to Douglas Gibbs, offering manager for peripherals at the Cognitive Systems division that is responsible for the Power Systems lineup, this …
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Sundry Power Systems Cloud Announcements
April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
April is generally a busy time for the Power Systems team, and not just for IBM i, but also for AIX and sometimes for Linux, too. In the spirit of Power Systems family unity, and in recognition of the fact that more than a few IBM i shops also have AIX and/or Linux in their shops, we wanted to tell you about some tweaks that Big Blue has made to the other platforms in the Power Systems family.
In announcement letter 221-099, IBM is making some tweaks to the Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition stack of software. The components …
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Every Day Has To Be Earth Day
April 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every day is Earth Day at IBM, as it has become for many companies that are trying to lessen their environmental impact and increase the sustainability of their businesses and of our planet at the same time.
But that does not mean that we don’t celebrate the real Earth Day, which is on April 22 this year and which was first held on that day in 1970. Back then, at the birth of the environmental movement, 10 percent of the population of the United States took to the streets to demonstrate peacefully against the environmental and health impacts of a …
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Back To The Future With A New IBM i Logo
April 12, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Brands only matter if a product survives in the market. And once a product does find its natural niche and has some longevity, there is an immediate tension between preserving that brand because it is what people are familiar with and updating that brand because of changes in the market or artistic taste or new media or just because the marketing people want to change stuff all the time sometimes because, well, that is what they do.
No one has to tell customers of the System/38, er, System/36, er, AS/400, er, AS/400e, er iSeries, er System i, …
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Crazy Idea Number 615: Variable Priced Power Systems Partitions
April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you stare down the blank page as much as I have in my career, you learn to not be afraid of that blank page. If you look at it long enough – usually for only a few minutes – ideas flip into existence like quantum particles spinning their curlicues. Most of them are silly, some are utterly useless, but eventually you get one that is worth following to see where it might go.
So it is with an idea that popped into my head, which was a daydream about IBM creating variable priced partitions on the Power Systems machines. …
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HCI Is The Dominant Converged System, Probably For Good
April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Way back in the dawn of time, all systems were “converged,” meaning that their compute, storage, and networking were embodied in their totality within the same system. These functions were pulled apart and a slew of best-of-breed server, switch, and storage appliances were created and they could be mixed and matched in myriad ways. Some might say in too many ways for the vast majority of IT shops, who don’t have the luxury of bales of money laying around to attract PhDs in computer science.
As distributed computing really took hold in the 1990s, but the 2000s it was clear …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus
March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Welcome to a new series in The Four Hundred called In The IBM i Trenches.
We spend a lot of time talking to people at IBM and at the key suppliers of systems software, application software, and development tools for the IBM i platform. But the ecosystem is a lot bigger than these players. There are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, depending. There are suppliers of third party maintenance as well as technical support and all kinds of programming and system management services. And there are an increasing number of hosting …
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Some More Power Systems Stuff Swept Into The Dustbin
March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the Power10 machines starting to come out later this year, the Power9 machines in the field for three years or so depending on the make and model, and the Power8 machines looking long in the tooth (but still technically and economically viable), you have to expect that Big Blue will wind down the sale of more and more older features.
In announcement letter 923-035, IBM has done just that. Nothing too big, but we think you need to be made aware of it just the same. And as you might expect, IBM also put a plug into the …
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Don’t Be A Blowhard
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.
Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …
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