Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Systems
February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue, we talked about the upgrade cycle for the IBM i operating systems over more than a decade based on the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey done by Fortra and pretty heavily massaged by us to reflect what we think is closer to reality for the IBM i market at large.
No matter if you look at the raw data from the survey or the more elaborate model we have built derived from the past eleven surveys, one thing is clear: There is a regular pattern for Power Systems upgrades among OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …
Read more -
IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .
February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.
So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.
In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March …
Read more -
State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Operating Systems
February 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What is more important: Keeping a server platform current or keeping its operating system current?
That is a trick question, and it is tricky in two ways. First, you should keep both hardware and software current, or more precisely, keep both as current as the applications, the budget, and good sense permits. A server older than five years is going to start having component failure (usually with the disk drives and fans), and one that is 10years old has the chance of a much more catastrophic failure. However, with a machine that is five to ten years old, you can …
Read more -
IBM Power On Track To Get Above $2 Billion A Year
February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM’s stock price is kissing $260 a share, and this is a level that, adjusted for stock splits, the company has not seen since before it ran up on the rocks in the early 1990s as its mainframe business and AS/400 business all shrank at the same time that RISC/Unix systems and X86 gear in the datacenter took off. What’s going on?
Well, here is the deal: IBM has customers using its Power and z servers for mission-critical back office systems, and a lot of the customers using its IBM i, AIX, Linux, and z/OS platforms are going to be …
Read more -
Does Your IT Budget Reflect The World At Large?
February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, numbers are so large they become almost meaningless. If I say $1 trillion or $5 trillion to you, do you really have a sense of it except relatively to some other number in the same order of magnitude? You can feel the change, but you can’t feel the actual magnitude of the actual number?
It is with this in mind that we turn to the latest forecasts for IT spending from Gartner, which shows a slight acceleration in the rate of spending increase from 2024 to 2025, but ironically, shows the absolute figures for IT spending in those two …
Read more -
A Year From Now, Most Power9 Systems Bite The Rust
January 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For whatever reason, there are lots of IBM announcements that are not released through IBM’s normal announcement channels. While participating in the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, I came to find out that an announcement for the sunsetting of technical support for selected Power9 systems was actually released last year. We had been expecting it around now, and it doesn’t take effect until a year from now, so whew! No harm, no foul.
As it turns out, this announcement was made back on September 12, 2024, through a PDF posting on Big Blue’s Systems support portal. You have to …
Read more -
Talking Power Systems And IBM i With Bargav Balakrishnan
January 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how the Power Systems division had a new vice president of product management – to be specific, Bargav Balakrishnan, who has spent decades in various technical and management roles within Big Blue. Balakrishnan takes over from Steve Sibley, who has been steering Power Systems hardware development since July 2007 and who was the longest serving executive in that role since the launch of the AS/400 back in 1988.
This week, we had a chat with Balakrishnan about the Power Systems business and the IBM i platform, and …
Read more -
Power Systems Has A New Vice President Of Product Management
January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Throughout the history of IBM systems, there are executives who steer the development of hardware and those that steer the development of microcode, operating systems, and other software. Still others at Big Blue manage the processor roadmaps as well as the evolution of the systems that make use of them, including all of the peripherals that go into turning central processing units into systems.
We have always liked these software and hardware people, as well as the multitudes who work with them and for them. They have given us valuable time and insight over the many decades that The Four …
Read more -
IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything
January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.
Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …
Read more -
IBM Boosts Prices Even Further Outside The United States
December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back on November 4, we told you about a price increase that IBM instituted across its Power Systems, storage hardware and storage software, and Software Maintenance services. These price increases were supposedly announced on September 3, but IBM’s system did not notify us of them until October 29, and we told you about it in the subsequent edition of this newsletter. The delay didn’t matter much because the price changes are not effective until January 1, 2025.
And now, the rest of the world is going to get an extra taste of inflation, as you will see in announcement letter …
Read more