• New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

  November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

  IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …

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• A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.

  The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …

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• A Year Later: Diving Deeper into How Connectria Brings IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS

  November 17, 2021 David Wilderman

  Connectria has worked in the IBM i and AIX hosting business since 2000. We have strong expertise in both IBM and cloud; we’ve offered IBM i private cloud services and support for more than a decade. We work with a great deal of Power Systems users who are making strides toward the cloud, as many have in the last year thanks to soaring cloud demand in the wake of the pandemic.

  Traditionally, we have helped IBM users by augmenting their existing staff as they retire or turnover by handling production workloads and delivering managed services with capability, not just hardware. …

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• Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.

  But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …

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• Guru: Physical System Performance

  November 15, 2021 Dawn May

  Almost all IBM i shops use logical partitioning and have several partitions on a single Powerbox. There may be several IBM i partitions, VIOS partitions, and possibly AIX or Linux on Power partitions. Regardless of what type of operating system is running in the partition, the hypervisor collects performance metrics for all partitions. These performance metrics are always being collected, and you can allow a partition access to these performance metrics. In the case of IBM i, this physical system performance data can be gathered by Collection Services. IBM documents this feature in Collecting and displaying CPU utilization for all …

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• IBM Adds ServicePacs For Power Machine Setup, Other Tweaks

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The legacy IBM Company from decades gone by charged a hell of a lot for its systems and offered a slew of handholding to make it all worthwhile. Somewhere along the way, service became a profit center and a revenue driver instead of an attitude about customer service, and you can’t entirely blame IBM because time is money and people don’t obey Moore’s Law economics.

  The ServicePac offerings that Big Blue has put together in recent years, which cover just about every aspect of its hardware and software stack, seem like a mix of old and new. Yes, the services …

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• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

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• A Preview Of The Comarch Cloud Calculator

  November 3, 2021 Tomasz Wachnicki

  For many IBM i shops, the cloud is a new consumption model and cloud-based applications and infrastructure is still a new way of doing things. If the cloud means anything, it means reducing the friction of buying and using capacity and moving from capital expenses that have to be amortized to utility-style consumption that does not have to be. But there are a lot of moving parts, and customers have to be aware of how these things plug together and how they are priced so they can reckon what their cloud bill will be each hour, day, week, month, and …

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• Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10

  November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.

  With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …

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• A Proper Accounting Of The Power Business

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue might be preparing for the spinout of its Kyndryl managed services company, now slated for early November, and its new financial presentations, which we reviewed two weeks ago, but that task is not yet done and until it is we are still getting the same financial view of IBM in the third quarter of 2021 ended in June. It was not a particularly memorable quarter when it came to IBM Systems group.

  But it is looking like IBM is going to be able to pad a better 2022, with Kyndryl taking on a huge amount of software …

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