Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM i Turns In Good Numbers For Q3, Bolstering Power Systems
October 26, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Historically speaking, the Power Systems division, now the Cognitive Systems division officially within IBM, has its worst period of sales in the first quarter of any year and its second worst 13-week revenue run in the third quarter of any year. And true to form, the third quarter of 2020 was not a great one for sales of Power iron, according to our model. That model is derived from IBM’s financial results and other data, and we update it every quarter when Big Blue reports to Wall Street.
Thanks to the fact that the Power9 generation of machines is entering …
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The Many Layers Of IBM i Managed Services
October 26, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One size rarely fits all across datacenter sizes and industry types, and the needs of the IT department change because conditions in the business change over time and across geographies, too. And that is why it is important to find a managed service provider that has both wide and deep experience with any particular platform.
Datanational’s Managed Services division is one of the early players in the IBM i space, and while its origins are in the American Midwest, its current operations spread out across the United States and span the globe from there. We recently profiled Datanational’s high availability …
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The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements
October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.
In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …
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Thoroughly Modern: Speed Up Application Development With Automated Testing
October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Starting with the System/38 and even more so with the AS/400 and its progeny, the hallmark of the system, at least according to IBM, was its ease of use. This is not exactly the right idea. While the integrated nature of the platform means it is easy to deploy, and the self-management nature of tech support, database administration, and even system administration yields an ease of management, and the tight coupling of the relational database management system with the high-level compilers has definitely yielded an ease of programming.
It is that last bit that is the hallmark …
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IBM Goes All-In On Hybrid Cloud
October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, that was a bit of a surprise, and probably something that only obliquely matters to IBM i shops at the moment, but Big Blue’s top brass has decided to carve out its managed infrastructure services business from Global Services and spin it out as a new, publicly traded company.
This business, which is tentatively being called NewCo until a real name is provided, is expected to be cut loose in a tax free manner and distributed to IBM’s shareholders by the end of 2021, so we have some time to assess the ramifications, if any, for the IBM i …
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Tweaks To Power System Iron Complement TR Updates
October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in July, IBM upgraded the peripheral I/O on several of its Power9-based servers with more PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth capacity, and now IBM is offering the increased bandwidth on several machines tuned up for running SAP HANA in addition to making a number of other hardware enhancements and withdrawals.
In announcement letter 120-054 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H922, a two-socket, 2U server, and in announcement letter 120-055 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H924, a two-socket, 4U system. As far as I can tell, the machines are essentially …
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Taking The Pulse Of The IBM i Market
October 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you want to know what is going on in an economy – what is really happening – you have to not talk to just the people in the state capitals or Washington D.C., but you have to talk to real business people who are out there every day, running businesses and trying to meet a payroll and provide that good or service that keeps the money rolling.
This is why we like talking to business partners in the IBM i marketplace, because the use of the system cuts across industries and geographies and it gives a real sense how …
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The Fall Technology Refreshes Are Almost Here
October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There has been a spring-fall rhythm to the cadence of software updates for along time, but the creation of the OpenStack cloud controller by NASA and Rackspace Hosting really snapped the commercial Linux distros into an April and October cycle of commercial rollups. And so, after many years of Technology Refreshes that follow the same rhythm, we come to expect updates to IBM i about now.
And starting tomorrow, IBM will be rolling out the fall Technology Refreshes for the current releases. That would be IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR3. And these, unlike those partial Technology …
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IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1
October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.
I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …
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The Smearing Of Infrastructure And Platform Clouds
October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The largest public clouds on the planet are also among the most secretive and influential companies in the IT sector, and therefore despite events that go one for days or, now in the time of coronavirus, for weeks on end, we get very little actual information out of them about specifically what is going on in the cloud market with any amount of specificity.
Yes, everybody and anybody who is an incumbent in the IT sector talks about how their “cloud” business is doing, and at least one of the big IT market researchers is sort of throwing up its …
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