Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn
May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …
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IBM Adds Deals And Tools To Cloudy Power Service
May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In February last year, Big Blue surprised many of us by announcing that it was putting Power8 and Power9 systems onto the IBM Cloud and offering up true cloud capacity, with utility pricing, for the capacity on Power S922 entry and Power E880 high-end servers. We did a detailed analysis of the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud offering here, and talked about the pricing for compute, storage, and networking for the service there. The offering was first available in June of last year, and subsequently the Power E980 has been added to the mix.
Now, we …
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Powers Of Ten
May 11, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The one thing that is easy to predict about designing and manufacturing a server processor is that no matter who is doing it, no matter what process in what decade, it is always hard and things always run late. Whether or not we on the outside world can see this, it remains true just the same. And that is because in any given era, with any given chip etching technique or chip architecture, server processors are always pushing up to the very limits of what is possible. And things go wrong.
This is why it is a good idea to …
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IBM Brings Flexible Utility Pricing To Private Power Systems
May 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A lot of people, including us, focus on the technologies that go into private, on-premises cloudy infrastructure and how that is almost always distinct from compute, storage, and networking technologies based on the same raw compute – Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or IBM Power, pick one – available on the public cloud. But there is an equally important gap between private and public clouds, and that is the pricing methodology for the two.
IBM’s Cognitive Systems division, which controls the Power Systems platform, wants to close that pricing gap by adopting the same flexible, utility-style pricing for on-premises Power Systems …
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Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?
May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …
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Big Blue Makes Moves To Mainstream Db2 Mirror
May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When IBM brought out its active-active Db2 for i database clustering extensions, called Db2 Mirror appropriately enough, almost exactly a year ago to improve the resiliency of databases and therefore the applications that run atop them on the IBM i platform, we had a few asks. As part of the April Technology Refresh announcements for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, some of those asks are answered and it looks like another one might be in the works.
The two most important things that we asked for are related, and it is all about making Db2 Mirror available and affordable for …
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Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements
May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.
Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …
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IBM i Before And After The Pandemic
April 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, both medically and economically, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic that has spread around the globe. The IBM i community is not immune to the effects of the stay at home provisions in many states and countries that has slowed business down to a crawl, but at the same time, many of the classic SMB companies who use the IBM i platform are available for economic stimulus. In my four decades of watching recessions, this is the first time I could ever say that sentence.
We like to keep our …
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Power Systems Hit By The Pandemic In Q1 2020
April 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2019, we told you that the Power9 platform was entering the long tail, that part of the cycle of the this generation of Power Systems machines where the revenue would dwindle off between that time and when the Power10 servers launch sometime in 2021. That tail perhaps just got a little longer and skinnier thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.
IBM doesn’t talk very much about the specifics of revenues and profits for the Power Systems line any more, just like it stopped talking about the iSeries …
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IBM Grants Amnesty On Software Maintenance After License Charges
April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Ask and ye shall receive. Last week, we were asking for Big Blue to wake up and provide a stimulus package for its Power Systems business in general and its IBM i business in particular. And one of the things we asked for – an amnesty canceling so-called after license charges for Software Maintenance for IBM i and AIX platforms was actually quietly announced to business partners – unexpectedly at that – on April 13, the same day our essay ran and three days after we wrote it.
We think this is a coincidence, not causation. And it’s a …
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