• No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.

  One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …

  Read more

• Talking Shop With Power Systems Chief Stephen Leonard

  May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whether or not you were aware of it, the Cognitive Systems division of IBM – what we still colloquially call Power Systems here at IT Jungle and what everyone else still calls it for the most part – has had a new general manager for quite some time and we had not yet had a chance to talk to the new chief. But recently we did hop on the Zoom with Stephen Leonard to get some insight about the Power Systems business and how it fits into the new and evolving IBM and the rapidly changing IT sector.

  Leonard dates …

  Read more

• Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.

  As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …

  Read more

• Resilience In The Platform, Resilience In The Business

  November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic is making it clear just how dependent much of the global economy is on mobility, entertainment, travel, and hospitality. But it is also making it clear that many parts of the economy, thanks to IT infrastructure, are resilient and are coping with the stresses and strains.

  “The need to rapidly innovate has clearly become apparent,” Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, explained in his keynote at the recent Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event. “And we will continue to do that for AIX, IBM i and Linux,” Sibley said, …

  Read more

• IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

  November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

  When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …

  Read more

• IBM i Turns In Good Numbers For Q3, Bolstering Power Systems

  October 26, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Historically speaking, the Power Systems division, now the Cognitive Systems division officially within IBM, has its worst period of sales in the first quarter of any year and its second worst 13-week revenue run in the third quarter of any year. And true to form, the third quarter of 2020 was not a great one for sales of Power iron, according to our model. That model is derived from IBM’s financial results and other data, and we update it every quarter when Big Blue reports to Wall Street.

  Thanks to the fact that the Power9 generation of machines is entering …

  Read more

• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

  Read more

• Power Systems Slump Is Not As Bad As It Looks

  July 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even for companies selling hand sanitizer, face masks, toilet paper, and shotguns, it is still a weird time to be in business just like it is for the rest of us. The Cognitive Systems division within IBM’s Systems group – what most people still call the Power Systems division – is no different.

  Big Blue is certainly facing some strong headwinds as it has to get through more than another year before the Power10 rollout begins, and the Power9 machines have really been in the field two and a half years already if you count the launch of the Power …

  Read more

• How Big Blue Stacks Up IBM i On Premises And On Cloud

  June 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s the $64,000 question: How much more does a slice of the IBM Cloud running IBM i cost compared to buying an on-premises machine with the same rough amount of capacity and installing IBM i on it and putting it into production? The answer to that question is: That all depends. But in general, as is the case with all infrastructures available on premises and on the cloud, the cloud is always more expensive.

  This is not a surprise if you think about it for a moment. By using cloudy infrastructure, you are offloading the hassle of maintaining hardware and …

  Read more

• IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

  January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.

  Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …

  Read more

Previous Articles