Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Looking Ahead To The IBM i New Year
January 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is always plenty to worry about in the world; that is what a world is for, after all. Human beings are both blessed and cursed by their frontal lobes, and all of us are engaged in some kind of prediction and prognostication in our daily lives, from little things like what someone is going to say next to big things like what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Running scenarios and simulations is how we make our way in the world, and it is both fun and useful so long as you don’t take it …
Read more -
Happy Holidays From IT Jungle!
December 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The years are always long ones, and that is a virtue, not a curse. Having work and purpose, and being part of a community, is not just a good thing, but the thing. It can be easy to forget that sometimes, when we are busy and caught up in our busy-ness.
But now is the time of year when the good folks at IT Jungle, for which I have had the great honor to be associated with for many decades now, take a break and spend time with family and friends and let the words follow where they will …
Read more -
UCG Technologies Takes Off To The Great White North
December 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For those of you who have never tried to build a business and employ people before, it is a hell of a lot harder to do than it may look. But it is an invaluable experience, and a way of life that some people cannot do without. Just ask Jim Kandrac, one of the most vocal and ebullient members of the IBM i community, and he will tell you all about it.
We had a chat with Kandrac last week just as the company was celebrating its 30th anniversary in business, which is a long time for any IT company …
Read more -
The AS/400 Lessons Come Back Around With Power9 Systems
December 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For many years before I took the job as Systems Editor at The Register and in the years since I left that post, the joke about any new system or device was: “Yes, but can it run Crysis?” Those of us writing stories would bend a few sentences around the idea, particularly with Linux systems, which if you equipped them with the WINE Windows emulator might allow said device to indeed run that first-person shooter game that was popular from 2007 through 2013.
As we think about the new “Witherspoon” Power9 server that IBM launched last week, we can’t help …
Read more -
Service Extension Outlined For IBM i 7.1 And PowerHA 7.1
December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Operating system suppliers do not like to support too many releases of their code at the same time. It stands to reason because software support costs have people as a foundation, and people only get more expensive, not less so. And the companies that make operating systems have newer code with more features and better security and reliability that they want their customers to move to.
IBM i 7.1 has been a well-regarded instance of Big Blue’s proprietary midrange operating systems, a line that arguably stretches all the way back to the first release of Control Program Facility (CPF) for …
Read more -
The Tipping Point For Power9
December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The server market is booming as 2017 comes to a close, and IBM is looking to try to catch the tailwind and lift its Power Systems business from the doldrums and get it rising again on the IBM i, AIX, and Linux fronts. The word on the street is that the first commercial Power9 machines, the ones aimed at HPC and AI workloads, will ship sometime before the end of the year, with a fairly quick ramp of Power9 systems for more generic workloads.
It can’t come a moment too soon, and while we wish IBM had started shipping Power9 …
Read more -
Counting The Cost
November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are strong believers in being thorough with both the technical and economic analysis of platforms. In the absence of a lot of performance and pricing information on Power Systems iron, we are always looking for ways to help IBM i shops try to figure out what to do when they are thinking about upgrading a machine or just tossing out the old one and buying a new one.
IBM isn’t shipping Power9-based machines that can support IBM i as yet, and it is not expected to do so until early next year. But in the meantime, Big Blue wants …
Read more -
IBM Expands Flash Drives For Power8 Iron
November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in October, IBM announced a new lineup of small form factor disk drives with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors as well as updates for 2.5-inch flash drives that were a little bit on the beefy size. We suspect that these drives were intended to be co-launched with Power9-based servers, as well as some new, skinnier flash drives that were announced just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.
On November 21, in announcement letter 117-108, Big Blue rolled out the new 2.5-inch flash drives that are based on 3D NAND flash memory and are rated at …
Read more -
More On That Power8 Core Activation Deal
November 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In days gone by, which unfortunately I remember very well, it was not that difficult for any of us to find out what the pricing on every single piece of hardware and software was that comprised an IBM system. The difficulty with IBM’s very sophisticated pricing databases was reckoning how the many pieces fit together to build a system.
Pricing information for Power Systems iron is a bit harder to come by these days, and as far as I know the pricing databases that I had access to for more than two decades were re-routed to configurators that could only …
Read more -
IBM Deal Prices Current Power8 Compute Like Future Power9
November 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The old proverb, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” is thankfully and just a little bit humorously applicable. In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, there was a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the fact that IBM is not shipping shiny new Power9 machines here in the fourth quarter and will not until early 2018. Given that fact and that the Power8’s are very long in the tooth, we fully expect for Big Blue to cut IBM i customers some kind of deal. There is a small deal for those buying Linux-only versions of the …
Read more