Timothy Prickett Morgan
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z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems
April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.
This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …
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Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.
It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …
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IBM Buys Snowflake Expert Hakkoda To Speed Data Modernization For AI
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The company may be best known for selling systems and software, but IBM still has a pretty large consultancy and services business even after spinning off a lot of outsource and hosting businesses as Kyndryl several years ago. Expertise is important to any consultancy, which means having the knowledge about how to solve pesky problems that can be applied to many clients, speeding up their projects and bolstering IBM’s revenues and profits.
That, in a nutshell, is what IBM’s acquisition of Hakkoda, consultancy founded as a partner to help IT shops move to Snowflake, the cloudy data warehouse system provider, …
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Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems
April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.
Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.
To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024 …
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Picking Apart An Ebullient GenAI Spending Forecast
April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In one of the big ironies of our time, companies are embedding AI acceleration functions into PCs that most consumers do not actively want while at the same time datacenter operators (be they captive or independent) are actively trying to get AI compute engines (mostly Nvidia and sometimes AMD GPUs) so they can train their GenAI and other machine learning models – and they can’t get enough of these accelerated servers.
Because a lot of PCs are already enhanced with AI functions, more and more PCs are falling under the label of an “AI PC,” and therefore the market for …
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More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems
March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.
These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …
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RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud
March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.
As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …
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Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming
March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.
In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.
Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …
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IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage
March 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If flash storage is ever going to replace disk storage, and there are good reasons to believe that at some point it will, this will happen because flash becomes normal and offers a mix of technical and economic reasons why it is worth a small premium – not a huge one, mind you – compared to buy dirt cheap spinning rust.
IBM’s new FlashSystem C200, which debuted last week in announcement letter AD25-0017, might be just the thing that small and medium Power Systems customers have been waiting for.
It has been a dozen years since IBM bought flash …
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IBM Switches To Build To Order For Entry Power Systems
February 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If we trust our memory, for the past several decades both high-end Power systems machines as well as all System z mainframes have been done on a build-to-order basis, and for the past decade at least, these big iron boxes were made at IBM’s factories in Poughkeepsie, New York, for the worldwide market.
For many years, entry and midrange AS/400 line was manufactured in three plants: the main factory in Rochester, Minnesota for the market in Canada and the United States and for certain high end machines in Europe, as well as Santa Palombo outside of Milan, Italy for entry …
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