Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.
This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …
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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.
Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.
Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.
We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …
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IBM’s Own Positioning Of Power Systems Revealed
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We don’t get a lot of data about how the Power Systems business is doing out of Big Blue these days, and we get even less, in terms of specifics, about the markets that IBM is chasing and how well or poorly it thinks it is doing in this regard. We get a snippet here and there from the quarterly results, we get some insight from the quarterly market trackers from IDC and Gartner, but not much else.
Digging around through some documents relating to the Power9 rollout, we stumbled across a few interesting charts that gives us at least …
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IBM Global Financing Deals To Push Power E950 And E980 Sales
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we have pointed out many times before, Big Blue is not just a creator and manufacturer of technology, but as one of the largest renters and lessors of equipment with vast access to capital and a relatively strong balance sheet, it is also effectively a large bank focused on IT. And more times than not, it takes IBM Global Financing – and the economic might that parent IBM brings to bear – to close the deal, as much as any hardware or software technology does.
At the moment, IBM is focused on increasing sales of the midrange “Zeppelin” and …
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Disaster Recovery Can Cover Your ASPs
September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Disaster recovery planning can be fun, depending on your mindset. As Hurricane Florence was heading for the Carolinas, we watched the storm with great interest before landfall and worried for a little while there the simulations of the ensuing tropical storm showed that it was going to hook a little to the west and – I kid you not – go right over Guild Companies headquarters here in Boone, North Carolina. A high developed over the Ohio Valley and bounced the storm to the south and west a little, and we did not get 80 mph winds as expected, although …
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IBM Tweaks Power Iron, Pulls Software, Adds Proactive Support
September 17, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue announced the “ZZ“ Power9 entry systems back in February, the “Boston” entry machines in May, and the midrange “Zeppelin” and high-end “Fleetwood” machines in August, which is the full product line. But IBM is still nipping and tucking the product line as customers react to it and want slightly different things than what initially came out with the systems.
In announcement letter 118-079, IBM made a few tweaks that will be interesting to IBM i shops. First of all, the mainstream Power S924 system, a 4U rack or tower system with two Power9 processors, …
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Where There Is A (Steve) Will, There’s An (IBM i) Way
September 17, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Being the chief architect of the IBM i platform is at the same time a difficult and an easy job, and Steve Will, who has been at this job for more than a decade, has been tireless in not only guiding the platform through the massive technology changes that the IT industry is constantly undergoing, but also in communicating the message that this platform is not the AS/400 as we knew 30 years ago.
People often complain that the IBM i platform does not have a chief marketing officer or even a marketing budget, but as far as I can …
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The Server Boom Goes From Sonic To Nuclear
September 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The smartphone, the second wave of Internet applications, the shift to cloud computing, and the normal expansion of processing and storage as companies hoard more and more data in the hopes of doing something useful with it have all combined to send the server market skyward.
In the second quarter, worldwide sales of servers experienced an astonishing 43.7 percent growth rate, to $22.53 billion dollars, the largest quarter for server sales in the history of information technology – even if you adjust for inflation and probably even if you take out the effects of DRAM and flash memory price hikes …
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In Memory Of Dan Burger
August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When in heaven do you start, when it has been two decades of sharing work and life together, as comrades in arms, as confidants, as companions in the heroic sense of that word?
You can start by saying that without Dan Burger, there never would have been an IT Jungle.
After an unexpected, brief, and intense illness, Dan passed away on August 19, to the great shock to all of us here at IT Jungle and to the people who knew Dan and know that he is gone. Dan was part of many communities, and the IBM i community was …
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