Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett Morgan is President of Guild Companies Inc and Editor in Chief of The Four Hundred. He has been keeping a keen eye on the midrange system and server markets for three decades, and was one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, the industry's first subscription-based monthly newsletter devoted exclusively to the IBM AS/400 minicomputer, established in 1989. He is also currently co-editor and founder of The Next Platform, a publication dedicated to systems and facilities used by supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and large enterprises. Previously, Prickett Morgan was editor in chief of EnterpriseTech, and he was also the midrange industry analyst for Midrange Computing (now defunct), and its editor for Monday Morning iSeries Update, a weekly IBM midrange newsletter, and for Wednesday Windows Update, a weekly Windows enterprise server newsletter. Prickett Morgan has also performed in-depth market and technical studies on behalf of computer hardware and software vendors that helped them bring their products to the AS/400 market or move them beyond the IBM midrange into the computer market at large. Prickett Morgan was also the editor of Unigram.X, published by British publisher Datamonitor, which licenses IT Jungle's editorial for that newsletter as well as for its ComputerWire daily news feed and for its Computer Business Review monthly magazine. He is currently Principal Analyst, Server Platforms & Architectures, for Datamonitor's research unit, and he regularly does consulting work on behalf of Datamonitor's AskComputerWire consulting services unit. Prickett Morgan began working for ComputerWire as a stringer for Computergram International in 1989. Prickett Morgan has been a contributing editor to many industry magazines over the years, including BusinessWeek Newsletter for Information Executives, Infoperspectives, Business Strategy International, Computer Systems News, IBM System User, Midrange Computing, and Midrange Technology Showcase, among others. Prickett Morgan studied aerospace engineering, American literature, and technical writing at the Pennsylvania State University and has a BA in English. He is not always as serious as his picture might lead you to believe.
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IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?
October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.
“A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …
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More Power7 And Power8 Features To Bite The Rust
October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power Systems catalog just keeps getting skinnier as the Power9 systems launch in early 2018 keeps getting closer. Ironically, as IBM pulls the plug on older Power Systems machines and their features, it is a good indication that Big Blue really is preparing the way for Power9. It is also a way to get customers who have no intention of spending on Power9 iron to buy something on their older gear before the features go away.
I saw a new abbreviation in announcement letter 917-177, which came out on October 24, and that was LTB – short for …
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Navigator For IBM i On A Zigzag Journey
October 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Navigator for IBM i provides system administrators with tools that prevent them from losing their marbles, or at least delaying that outcome until the boss mentions that grounds maintenance and window washing have been added to the list of sys admin responsibilities.
Navigator continues to receive updates and enhancements, mostly based on filling in holes in the features and functionality that the product it replaced already possessed. IBM also takes requests from current users, which also find their way into future enhancement. But for the unskilled user trying to climb the learning curve, Navigator can be a frustrating stumble from …
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Advice For The Power Systems Shop That Has To Buy Now
October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Having to buy a new computer as one generation is ending and the new one is not quite yet beginning puts users in a tough spot. Without knowing the feeds and speeds of the system, you can’t compare what you might be giving up if you buy now. And without knowing the price of the new machine, and the current price of its predecessor that you might buy, you can’t tell how hard you have to negotiate if you buy the current model instead of the one that is coming down the pike in a few months.
IT budgets tend …
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Big Blue Profits, Poised For The Power9
October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Let’s just cut straight to the good news. Even though IBM’s revenues have declined for the 22nd quarter in a row, and its profits are declining even faster, the substantial investments that Big Blue has made in its System z14 mainframes and Power9 systems is about to start paying off.
The System z14 mainframes made their debut in July and start shipping in the middle of September, converting from a drain on the company to a fairly large flow of cash. Power9 chip development ceased a while ago, and we presume most of the system engineering is done, and even …
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Sundry October Power Systems Announcements
October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.
The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …
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Power9 Big Iron “Fleetwood/Mack” Rumors
October 9, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, the universe just hands you a great title, like that one above. As the Power9 platform is rolling out across the field to various launch pads, with entry, midrange, and high-end systems in the works, word always inevitably leaks out about what Big Blue has planned with its future systems.
In the case of the high-end machines, we are hearing rumors that the current top-end Power E880 and its half-pint Power E870, which went by the code-name “Brazos” within IBM, likely in deference to the river in New Mexico, will be replaced by a machine code-named “Fleetwood,” no doubt …
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Talking Power9 With IBM Fellow Brad McCredie
October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power8 generation is at the very end of its life, and the Power9 generation is just starting to crawl and soon will be walking and then running. IBM is a bit behind its processor rollout cadence, but that delay is not as great as the one that Intel has experienced with its recent “Skylake” Xeon SP processor launch, which was expected last September and then was held off formally until July. We had heard Power9 iron would launch in July, then in October, and now we are hearing maybe in December.
It is unusual for there not to be …
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Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In days gone by, IBM used to have a great amount of insight into what was going on at AS/400 shops. But somewhere between the iSeries and through the System i down to Power Systems running IBM i and what is, apparently, being called Db2 instead of DB2 these days, with or without i, Big Blue stopped having the kind of insight that helped us not only understand the trends in our community, but how they related – or didn’t – to the larger IT community.
This community, which is more than a marketplace but still encompasses that, has always …
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The Necessity Of A Power Systems 911
September 25, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
People are starting to talk about the future, and in some cases perhaps impending, Power9 systems from IBM and its OpenPower partners. The chatter is about machines with two, four, eight, or 16 processors, so far at least. But the one thing I am not hearing anyone talk about is an entry Power box, either with or without the Cognitive Systems label, that has a modestly configured processor complex that is suitable for the IBM i workloads in the current customer base and yet allows them to affordably and quickly expand their capacity to absorb more and more workloads in …
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