Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Shutters Systems Research And Development Labs In China
September 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What a change four decades makes, and what a bigger change even a decade has made, when it comes to the relationship between the United States and China.
Four decades ago, when Big Blue started to do business for real in China, the only reason to believe that the Middle Kingdom might one day rival the United States economically and militarily was the vastness of its population, the breadth and depth of its natural resources, and the patience and tenacity of its command economy. China was the anchor economy of the so-called BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – …
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How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.
But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …
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Getting A Handle On What GenAI Might Cost
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Because of my other day job at The Next Platform, I can give you a pretty good idea about what it costs to train an AI model or run inference against it once it is trained. But I have seen very little data that tries to give any of a sense of what it costs to add generative AI functionality to applications.
But interestingly, Gartner analysts embedded some such data in a report about how it expected many GenAI projects to be abandoned by the end of 2025 after their proofs of concept fail. That so many PoCs will …
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IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features
August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.
This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …
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IBM Tweaks Power10 Hardware: Fatter Memory, Other Stuff
August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We haven’t seen a lot of hardware announcements this year from Big Blue for the Power Systems platform, and you really should not expect much in the way of new hardware when Power11 systems are expected to be launched in 2025 and the Power10 machines have been in the field since late 2021 for the Power E1080 and since July 2022 for the rest of the line.
To be fair, we did have the entry “Bonnell” Power S1012 machine come out in May this year. So it has not been a total drought. But hardware launches are not on an …
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Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i
August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.
IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …
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Power Systems Continues Its Slight Upward Trend
August 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is an old saying: No news is good news, and with a slew of medical issues in our family right now, we get that. But what is also true is that good news is good news, and when it comes to the Power Systems business this is – happily surprisingly – precisely what is happening.
The overall IBM business is doing alright as well, which is also good for Big Blue and for the customers that depend upon its systems to do their mission critical computing.
In the quarter ended in June, Big Blue’s sales were up a smidgen, …
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How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …
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Fans Revving Like Crazy On Your Power10? Check The Firmware
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a patch to firmware for Power Systems is defective, and when it does happen, we like to point it out.
Defective PTFs happen fairly regularly with IBM i, as defective patches happen for other operating systems. Sometimes the effects of defective PTF patches are dramatic, sometimes they are just weird. Sometimes they are in between.
Both IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 have a defective patch in the firmware for Power10 systems, and to be super precise it affects machine types 9105-22A (Power S1022), 9105-22B (Power S1022s), 9105-41B (Power S1014), 9105-42A (Power …
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Xorux Is Gaining Traction With LPAR2RRD System Monitoring
July 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
System monitoring and management is a lot more complicated these days than it was back in the early days of the AS/400 or even the middle years of the iSeries. To start, there are physical and virtual servers, physical and virtual storage, and physical and virtual networking to deal with, and finding a tool – or a set of integrated tools – that can do that, and do it across disparate and incompatible platforms, is a big ask.
But a little known software company called Xorux, which is based in Prague in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, actually …
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