Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems Continues Its Slight Upward Trend
August 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is an old saying: No news is good news, and with a slew of medical issues in our family right now, we get that. But what is also true is that good news is good news, and when it comes to the Power Systems business this is – happily surprisingly – precisely what is happening.
The overall IBM business is doing alright as well, which is also good for Big Blue and for the customers that depend upon its systems to do their mission critical computing.
In the quarter ended in June, Big Blue’s sales were up a smidgen, …
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How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …
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Fans Revving Like Crazy On Your Power10? Check The Firmware
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a patch to firmware for Power Systems is defective, and when it does happen, we like to point it out.
Defective PTFs happen fairly regularly with IBM i, as defective patches happen for other operating systems. Sometimes the effects of defective PTF patches are dramatic, sometimes they are just weird. Sometimes they are in between.
Both IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 have a defective patch in the firmware for Power10 systems, and to be super precise it affects machine types 9105-22A (Power S1022), 9105-22B (Power S1022s), 9105-41B (Power S1014), 9105-42A (Power …
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Xorux Is Gaining Traction With LPAR2RRD System Monitoring
July 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
System monitoring and management is a lot more complicated these days than it was back in the early days of the AS/400 or even the middle years of the iSeries. To start, there are physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual storage, and physical and virtual networking to deal with, and finding a tool – or a set of integrated tools – that can do that, and do it across disparate and incompatible platforms, is a big ask.
But a little known software company called Xorux, which is based in Prague in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, actually …
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Celerity Buys Chilli IT To Expand Its Power Systems Business
June 24, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Like so many companies that have been part of the AS/400 ecosystem, both Celerity and Chilli IT are relatively small firms with long histories in peddling Power-based systems from IBM and who expanded into providing managed services over the years. Celerity and Chilli IT are also similar in another way in that both are based in the United Kingdom and largely serve customers in the British Isles.
Now, they are one company in the wake of a partnership that the two companies formed back in February that turned into an outright acquisition a few weeks ago, with Celerity buying Chilli …
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The 13,152 Days Of The AS/400 Platform, And Counting
June 24, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the computer market, whether it is for laptops or datacenter iron, it is hard to say if longevity is gauged in human years or dog and cat years or something else like maybe historical or geological time.
In some ways, 36 years old, which is what has just happened to the AS/400 platform a few days ago, is a long time to do anything, and in others, 36 years is just the beginning of a process. As we have pointed out when celebrating the AS/400’s birthday in prior years, the origins of the platform reach back to 1978 when …
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Just What Is Digital Transformation, And How Big Will It Get?
June 10, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, we really wonder what people are talking about. And not in a snotty way like “we know better,” but in a way that we truly are not sure what they mean. The term “digital transformation,” often abbreviated DX and not meaning “digital experience” like UX is short for “user experience,” is one of the things we think we understand until we scratch the surface.
We have been doing digital computing in the enterprise with electronic computers for more than six decades, and we using gussied up loom programming machines powered by punch cards since the US Census of 1890. …
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Big Blue Offers Managed Services For PowerVS Private Cloud Pods
May 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are lots of ways to skin the cloud infrastructure cat. You can rent cloudy capacity and manage it yourself. That is called Power Virtual Server. You can buy your own virtualized Power Systems servers and manage them with the same control plane as is used for the PowerVS cloud. That is called Power Virtual Server Private Cloud, of PowerVS Private Cloud for short. (Sort of.)
And now, with announcement letter AD24-0420, Big Blue is offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it from the company’s own …
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What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At
May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.
After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar …
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Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012
May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.
Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …
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