• 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 …

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• The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition

  June 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power9 processor not coming to the IBM i and AIX platforms until sometime early in 2018, rather than right now as many of us were led to believe would be happening, we have some extra time on our hands. So we should all – including the executives who run IBM Systems and its subordinate Cognitive Systems division (formerly known as Power Systems) – take this opportunity to take a hard look at how the IBM i platform is packaged and priced and how a modern integrated platform should be architected.

  The IBM i customer base needs the Cognitive …

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• IBM i And AIX Won’t Get Power9 Until 2018

  June 5, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out yet, IBM’s biggest priority when it comes to the Power9 processor is Linux. Not IBM i and not AIX, which are Big Blue’s own operating system platforms and which have generated the vast majority of revenues for the combined Power platform since Linux made its debut on Power and System z machines almost two decades ago.

  As we have previously reported, IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9 processors sometime in the second half of this year, and officially has not given a precise date for when the first systems using …

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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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• 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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• 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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• IBM Gives The Midrange A Valentine’s Day (Processor) Card

  February 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As expected, IBM rolled out a Valentine’s Day surprise for its IBM i and AIX customer bases with a new pair of machines aimed at giving a low powered, lower cost option for the customers running its legacy applications instead of Linux, which is the darling of the Power Systems business these days even though it does not come even close to representing the majority of the Power Systems revenue stream.

  The Power Mini or IBMini, as I have been calling the machine affectionately, turns out to be a variant of the existing single-socket Power S812 system that IBM has …

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• More Insight Into The Rumored Power Mini System

  February 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM wanted to get customers to move ahead to new iron and the Moore’s Law increases in processing capacity meant that it needed to gear down boxes to bring customers forward, IBM actually did something about it and offered a cut-down machines with lower – and competitive – prices.

  Remember the AS/400 Model 150 machines launched two decades ago, and then the breakthrough “Invader” AS/400 Model 170 machines, using the “Apache” and then “Northstar” PowerPC processors that followed them in 1998 and 1999? These systems, in a very real sense, saved the AS/400 business. Back …

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