Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Converged Systems Conundrum
September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The idea behind converged and hyperconverged systems was one that AS/400 and IBM i shops have long been familiar with, but which customers using other systems had become unfamiliar with or had never known as they adopted other systems for their mission critical systems. It’s so simple that it can be expressed in one word: integration. Yes, that’s the i in IBM i, and while this is the hallmark of the System/38, the System/36, and the AS/400 platforms from decades ago, ironically the IBM i platform is not considered a converged or hyperconverged platform by the market researchers at …
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Just How Big Is The Whole Power Systems Business?
September 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There may be a lot of economic uncertainty out there in the world, due to medical and political uncertainty that seems to be all over the globe, but there is one thing you can count on: Companies need more compute capacity to do ever-more intricate processing.
In the second quarter ended in June, the server market turned in one of the best quarters in its history – even when you consider the inflation adjusted revenues from the peak Dot-Com Boom nearly two decades ago as 2000 was coming to a close. According to the research done by IDC, server spending …
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Driving System TCO With IBM Global Asset Recovery Services
September 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When economic times are uncertain, that means by necessity that IT budgets are also uncertain, and saying that IT is the core of the business and that software is eating the world does nothing to change these hard, cold, capital facts. And that is why in these times people often turn to used, refurbished, certified pre-owned, or even remanufactured IT equipment instead of trying to get the acquisition of a PC, laptop, a smartphone, a switch, a storage array, or a server by the bean counters in the accounting department.
This is no different than what many of us experience …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems
August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.
This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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IBM Clarifies Utility Pricing, Adds Solution Edition For New Entry Power Server
August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the middle of July, IBM announced new entry Power Systems servers – tweaks to the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 to be specific – that had expanded PCI-Express 4.0 I/O capability as well as a new utility pricing scheme on the Power S922 and Power S924 that helps to lower the capital outlay for buying servers and makes it a little bit more like the economic experience on the public clouds.
This utility pricing, known as the Power Systems Private Cloud Solution, has been available the Power E950 midrange and Power E980 high-end systems since it …
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Drilling Down Into The Power10 Chip Architecture
August 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, we told you some general things about the future Power10 chip from IBM based on a roadmap briefing that we got from the IBM tech team ahead of their presentation at the Hot Chips 32 chip conference last week. IBM was gracious enough to let us talk about the Power10 chip generally before that presentation, because we have a Monday morning deadline no matter what. And this week, we can drill down into the Power10 architectural details a bit more.
The presentation at Hot Chips was given by William Starke, the chief architect of the Power10 processor who …
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Power To The Tenth Power
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is one of my favorite times of the year, with the Hot Chips symposium usually underway this week at Stanford University and all the vendors big and small trotting out their, well, hottest chippery. In this case, hot means “extremely interesting” but it often means “burning shedloads of watts” as well. But this is the time that the chip architects show off what they have been working on for four or five years and what has already been in production in recent months or will be in the coming months.
IBM tends to jump the gun a bit …
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HelpSystems Buys GlobalScape For $217 Million For File Transfer Expansion
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Secure file transfer is a thing, particularly with companies working remotely, and this is why the investors behind the HelpSystems conglomerate are shelling out a whopping $217 million, or $9.50 per share, to buy a publicly traded rival in the secure managed file transfer tool arena called GlobalScape.
The deal offered by HelpSystems and agreed to represents a 16 percent premium over the market capitalization of GlobalScape prior to the announcement of the acquisition, and the deal will be funded by cash on hand at HelpSystems plus new debt that is backed by Jefferies Finance and credit funds affiliated with …
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Accelerating DX Does Not Necessarily Mean Spending More Bucks
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is important to not confuse activity with the money it generates. While activity and money can sometimes be proportional as well as rising and falling together, it is not always the case that they point in the same direction. And particularly when it comes to IT spending during a pandemic-induced recession that the world has not seen in a hundred years. Equally important to consider is that overall IT spending is not necessarily an indicator of how spending in any particular area will rise and fall. All boats definitely do not rise together, especially in the choppy economic waters …
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Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i
August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.
The fun bit is that not only system software makers like IBM get …
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