Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The Chatter About Future Power9 Servers
September 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In late July, the first of the Power9 systems, the one code-named “Witherspoon” that was designed explicitly to be installed in the “Summit” and “Sierra” clustered supercomputers installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively, started rolling off the production line at Big Blue and into those HPC centers that are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is the beginning, however quiet, of what we expect will be a rolling thunder rollout of Power9 systems in late 2017 and through early 2018.
Because there have been so many processor announcements in the past …
Read more -
Sundry Withdrawals For Power7 And Power7+ Gear
August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The sunrise of the Power9 systems is moving in slow motion and we no longer expect to see shiny new iron using this state of the art processor running either IBM i or AIX until sometime early in 2018. It is looking like maybe March or April at the moment. But the sunsetting of vintage Power Systems iron that will be displaced by the arrival of the Power9 machines is proceeding.
Trying to figure out what is being ripped out of the IBM catalog, and when it will be removed from the sales channel, is more difficult than trying to …
Read more -
Why Not Overclock Power Chips For IBM i?
August 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Remember way back in 2000, when Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer and now the world’s dominant supplier of processors in the datacenter, said that it would be able to deliver processors that run at 10 GHz by 2011. Well, that was six years ago, and that sure as hell did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. But if anyone can crank the clocks high on a processor, it is IBM with its Power and System z engines, and we think it can push them a little higher and give certain customers who …
Read more -
IBM Moves HMC Management To Native Power Server, LPARs
August 14, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Out of band management is not a new thing in the IT sector, and many of the best and most sophisticated pieces of software in the world have a distinct management console of some sort that gathers up the state of a machine or collection of machines and uses it to initially configure those devices and to coerce them to behave themselves despite their nature for electronic mischief.
The Hardware Management Console, or HMC, has been around for so long in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i line for so long we can’t remember when people were not …
Read more -
What Is Driving Application Modernization?
August 7, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What you don’t measure you cannot manage, the old adage says. And the key vendors in the IBM i community, ever chasing that next opportunity, do a pretty good job querying the installed base of customers about what they are up to and why. A better job than Big Blue, which should be the biggest beneficiary of the 125,000-strong IBM i base, if you want to be truthful about it.
We are always on the hunt for any insight into what is going on out there in IBM i Land, and Rocket Software, a provider of application modernization and …
Read more -
The Power Neine Conundrum
July 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you take a very liberal interpretation of what the term cognitive systems means, including database, middleware, analytics software and the underlying system hardware and software, then IBM has spent untold tens of billions of dollars – probably hundreds of billions, really – creating its Cognitive Systems stack. We wonder what all of that analytics and machine learning software would say, with Watson’s voice of course, if it was pointed at IBM’s entire financial and technical history.
What is the prognosis, Doctor Watson?
We here at IT Jungle are an optimistic lot, and we realize that IBM, like many of …
Read more -
Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems
July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.
The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has …
Read more -
Mixed Results For IT Spending Forecasts
July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have made it through the first half of 2017, and now is a good time to take a pause and count the money that the IT vendors of the world have amassed from the hardware, software, and services they provide to the datacenters of the world. And so, IDC and Gartner have done just that even ahead of the reporting of financial results for the second quarter. The results from these two firms generally agree, and they show that, as always, different parts of the business are growing even as other parts slow or even shrink.
One big reason …
Read more -
IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops
July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.
With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …
Read more -
Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine
June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …
Read more