Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Say Sayonara To IBM i 7.1 Next Spring
May 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We sometimes think that the IBM announcement system tries to pull a fast one on us. Like many people in this market, we watch this system like a hawk, looking for anything pertinent to Power Systems or IBM i. A very important announcement was made on April 11, well ahead of the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, two weeks ago, but no one we know saw it. A business partner saw it late last week and alerted us to it.
In announcement letter 917-080, Big Blue announced the date when IBM i 7.1 will see its software …
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Clearing The Decks Ahead Of The Power9 Launch
May 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is ever the way: In with the new and out with the old. With the Power9 processors set for their debut sometime this summer, and shipments beginning in the second half of the year, Big Blue is looking to clear out the inventory of older Power Systems equipment it has sitting around in the barn and to remove older items from its catalog to make room for a slew of new gear.
Over the past several months, IBM has been doing some spring cleaning, and we thought we would round all of these marketing withdrawals for Power Systems equipment …
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Contain Your IBM i Enthusiasm
May 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the IT business, what is old is often new again. And so it is with the software containers that are taking certain datacenters by storm these days, and the virtual machines and hypervisors that run them that predate them as a volume product on X86 servers by a decade.
Let’s have some fun with history.
Virtual machines were invented for IBM mainframes in the VM operating system way back in the dawn of time, well, 1972 with the launch of Virtual Machine Facility/370, which ran a lightweight operating system called the Conversational Monitoring system and as it matured could …
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The Power Systems Decline Did Not Have To Be This Bad
April 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for its final quarter of 2016, we said that the Power Systems business would decline in every quarter ahead of the Power9 launch, and while this is not a hard thing to predict, it has certainly turned out to be true in the first quarter of 2017. Both IBM’s Power Systems and Systems z machines and their related operating systems were hit by gut-wrenching declines.
The good news, as we have pointed out time and again, is that IBM’s true systems business is distinct from and is a superset that …
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IBM Gives AIX Some Of The Integration Spice Of IBM i
April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes I just have to laugh. One of the best things about the IBM i platform, and the thing that truly separates it aside from its sophisticated single memory storage architecture is the fact that it is an integrated system that is easy to deploy and even easier to administer. So many functions of the system are automated that companies that don’t want to hire database experts can do a very good job of coding applications and running their business with far fewer techies than other platforms require.
The same has never been said of AIX, and it certainly cannot …
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Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear
April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.
But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …
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Why Is IBM Giving AIX Shops Better Deals Than IBM i Shops?
April 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It looks like AIX shops got a better Valentine’s Day card than IBM i customers did.
One of the things that was supposed to happen when the iSeries and pSeries product lines were merged back in 2000 was that a unified Power Systems organization was going to run both the OS/400 (now IBM i) and AIX software platforms on a single, unified hardware platform with a single and equal hardware price. This was something we had been demanding from IBM so long that we were blue in the face, so to speak, and to its credit, IBM stuck to the …
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MSPs Get Monthly IBM i Pricing; Why Not Everyone?
April 3, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
On one of the problems with cloud computing, from the point of view of the people building the clouds, is that they can provide per-user or per-hour utility style pricing to their customers for hardware and system software, but they have to pay for perpetual licenses to software and buy the hardware to provide that service. They have to get a lot of capital and shell it out before they can even begin to take in the first dollar.
Over the past several years, IBM has offered managed service providers – really more hosting companies than true cloud capacity vendors …
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The Bang For The Buck Of Entry IBM i Servers
March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I rounded up the feeds, speeds, and pricing of the new Power S812 Mini system that Big Blue started selling in the middle of March to IBM i shops with modest computing needs. We are talking one core running at just over 3 GHz and providing an aggregate of 9,880 units of performance on the Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) online transaction processing benchmark test used to gauge the oomph of Power Systems and their predecessors.
This ain’t a lot of computing in 2017, people. Just pointing that out. And I will …
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IBM Jacks Up Hardware Maintenance Fees
March 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It happens every couple of years or so, and in fact, it has not happened in a couple of years so it looks like we were about due. We are talking about maintenance price hikes on a slew of IBM hardware, price hikes that are aimed mostly at stemming the gradual decline in maintenance revenues that IBM’s Global Services unit is seeing as its base of hardware contracts. In theory, such a price increase boosts the profits of its services arm, but it also helps cover some of the inflationary costs associated with providing hardware support and housing parts of …
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