• 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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• Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

  But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

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• Sibley Highlights Power10’s Security and AI Capabilities

  October 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As the vice president and global offering management for Cognitive Systems at IBM, Steve Sibley often gets the honor of delivering the keynote address at the annual POWERUp conference. During his keynote at last week’s show, Sibley used the time to delve into the latest Power10 processor and its extensive list of new features, including some designed specifically to boost AI and security.

  “One of the real privileges I have as project manager for Power Systems to be able to take the key innovations our team is developing in Rochester and our different development labs around the world, and bring …

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• Early Bird Special For Common Europe Congress Ends October 14

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Copenhagen, which is known as “the happiest city in the world,” has its coronavirus situation under control and will be hosting the Common Europe Congress user group meeting from October 31 through November 3. Unlike the COMMON POWERUp 2021 event, which was supposed to be hosted in person in Virginia Beach, Virginia, as well as online, but has now been switched to a totally virtual event.

  Denmark has had its borders open since September 9, and vaccination rates are high and cases are very low. The reason, in part, has to do with high trust in the Danish government and …

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• For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

  Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …

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• The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

  For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

  A lot more than you probably think, as it …

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• Some Power9 Tweaks And Withdrawals

  September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a very rare announcement cycle where IBM announces a new machine and does not offer some tweaks to or withdrawals for older machinery. And, as we always expect, Big Blue did both as part of the September 8 IBM i and Power E1080 server announcements.

  In announcement letter 121-052, IBM made some tweaks to the NVM-Express U.2 form factor solid state flash drives for the Power9 entry, midrange, and high end servers. The new U.2 flash drives have an 800 GB capacity and are aimed at AIX and Linux partitions that have 4K block sizes. These drives …

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