Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.
What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …
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IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away
February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.
The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …
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It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy
February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.
Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …
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Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i
February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.
I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …
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IBM Takes On The Memory Crunch With New FlashSystem Lineup
February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a shortage of main memory and flash in the world right now. This is due, in large part, to the explosion in investments in yottascale AI systems that burn tens of gigawatts of juice. Such systems require a huge amount of HBM stacked memory on their GPU and XPU accelerators as well as high performance DRAM and flash in their hosts and truly enormous shared flash storage to serve up datasets.
The biggest companies buy up most of the DRAM and flash chips a year or more before they are even made, but with demand skyrocketing, the memory …
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IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales
February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as …
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Perhaps 2026 Is The Year For Power Systems To Boom A Little
February 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In wrapping up IBM’s call with Wall Street analysts in the wake of Big Blue reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025 – which was a very good one for the most part, by the way – chief executive officer Arvind Krishna referred to the IBM Company as a “software-led, platform-centric company.”
This is no news to any of us who have been using or programming or analyzing the business of IBM over the many decades. Of course this is true. But for IBM, the main platform that is driving the big bucks at the top and …
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It Looks Like 2026 Will Be a Good Year For Power-IBM i Upgrades
January 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We look forward every year to having our hands on the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey results, which are gathered in the fall and presented in January the following year. This is the 12th IBM i Marketplace Survey, and we never forget that it was our own Dan Burger who talked to Tom Huntington at HelpSystems, now Forta, to get the survey started. We do our part to try to get you all to take the survey and we use it as grist for our models of the base, which we also share with you.
This being a new year …
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FalconStor Doubles Down On IBM Power With Habanero Offsite Data Protection
January 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the secrets to the success and longevity of the OS/400 and IBM i platform is integration for the sake of simplicity. That may be two closely interrelated secrets, now that we think about it, but the important thing is that for any product or service to take off among the IBM i faithful, it has to integrate well with the platform and it has to mask complexity even when an underlying technology might be quite hairy.
With the rise of many clouds and hosters based on Power Systems machinery and the desire to get offsite data protection to …
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A Tale Of Two Server Markets
January 12, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Happy New Year! It is hard to imagine what might happen next. But what I can tell you for sure is that until the gas comes out of the GenAI expansion, infrastructure spending in the datacenter in the aggregate will continue to be increasingly dominated by AI systems even if this is not the case at most IBM i shops.
Before the Dot Com Boom, the market researchers at Gartner and IDC put out competing reports on sales of servers and external storage arrays, which we found very useful and you no doubt did, too. In 2022, both companies stopped …
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