Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power9 Enters The Long Tail
January 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no way to sugar coat this, so I will just say it: It is going to be a long year for the Power Systems platform this year, and I will be so pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong about that. But I don’t think I will be.
The Power Systems platform, as we have explained in the past, had a great 2018, with revenues up 9.5 percent to just a tad over $2 billion as far as we can tell from our financial model, which we have painstakingly developed. Now, mind you, the Power Systems market exited …
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Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers
January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing today.
Timothy Prickett Morgan: …
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IBM i Shops Walking A Flatter Upgrade Path In 2020?
January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In general, there is a rough correlation between growth in online transaction processing workloads and related enterprise applications, and the growth in the overall economy. At some point in the past, when OLTP was relatively new and many companies were still doing batch processing, OLTP workloads grew many times faster than gross domestic product – much as many data analytics, storage, and machine learning workloads are doing today.
So when we see that IBM i shops are looking to upgrade in 2020 at a much higher level than we would expect based on historical and anecdotal trends, it gets our …
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Reality Reflects IBM i, Which Reflects It Back
January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the fullness of time, the datacenters of IBM i shops will reflect the trends in the overall IT sector and in the respective industries and IT scale of their peers who have other back-end systems of record and a mix of systems of engagement. Give or take.
That’s why we pay attention to the larger trends going on in the IT sector. The IBM i base may be coming a little slowly to true cloud compute, storage, and networking capacity, but it is getting there finally thanks to the efforts of IBM, Connectria, Skytap/Microsoft, Google, and others.
It takes …
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There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …
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Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers and a new one. That would …
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Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With age and wisdom comes a certain kind of calm expectation that does not necessarily put one in the frame of mind to make prognostications as much as making some observations, laying out priorities, and expressing desires. Making predictions is really about placing qualified and intelligent bets, more like hunting than the slower, measured pace of agriculture, which is about planning and fostering growth.
As I approach the new decade, I am less in the mood to don my wizard hat with its moons and stars on it and to rub the dust off the crystal ball on my desk …
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From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.
But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …
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Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast
January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.
Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers — Alison Butterill, IBM i product …
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Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i
December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.
They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …
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