Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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COVID-19 Response: Manta Cuts Training Prices, Offers Freebies
April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Everybody is doing their part to try to cushion the blow of the coronavirus outbreak and also to stay in business themselves. It’s a delicate balance, and one that we are all trying to manage.
Manta Technologies, which has been providing IBM i training for nearly the past three decades and online training for other platforms for more than four decades now, is doing its part. For nearly 20 years now, Manta’s library of more than 130 IBM i courses has been available online, and people all over the world use it to brush up on existing skills and …
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Thoroughly Modern: Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever
April 15, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are very few things in life that don’t have some kind of distribution across behavior patterns. Some phenomena are driven by bell curves or inverted bell curves or some other kind of distribution – including random. And as such, we all know that the companies that comprise the IBM i base fall on different parts of the spectrum of behavior with regard to how up to date their systems and their applications are.
In normal markets, where some of the pressures are not so intense, it might not matter as much to have a modern system, software, and application …
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Where Is The Power Systems-IBM i Stimulus Package?
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The governments of the world are spending to try to compensate for the economic slowdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is the right thing to do. We wonder why IBM has not done more to help its Power Systems business.
Just before the coronavirus pandemic really started to kick in throughout Europe and the United States, and as the Power9 family of Power Systems machines was entering the long tail part of its sales cycle, IBM announced a deal in Europe that gave customers buying its so-called scale out (what we would call entry) one-socket and two-socket …
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The X Factor: Home Base
April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you might imagine, New York City is on my mind a lot these days. And I have some advice for you as you are transitioning to tighter quarters and working from home – something I have been doing for 25 years now.
Way back in the dawn of time, back in the wake of the launch of the AS/400 when I graduated from college and moved to New York City because it was the biggest, scariest thing that I could do, my brain sort of melted from the enormity of it all. At that time, a recession was underway …
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