• A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

  December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

  First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …

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• IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan.

  Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle …

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• IBM Debuts GRS, A New Data Replication Service in the Cloud

  November 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you run your IBM i workloads in the IBM Cloud, there is a new data replication offering available that could help you recover more quickly from a disaster. Dubbed Global Replication Services (GRS), the offering is only available for Power Systems Virtual Server customers running in two IBM data centers at the moment. But IBM says GRS could eventually be used with on-prem Power and FlashSystem deployments, too.

  GRS, which IBM introduced in a September 22 blog post, provides asynchronous data replication for IBM i, AIX, and Linux data, as well as failover and failback mechanisms. The offering …

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• Flash Storage Is Table Stakes For Any IBM i Cloud

  October 31, 2022 Andrew Johnson David Fahrenkrug

  After a long wait, the IBM i market is finally entering the true cloud era, one where utility pricing, performance, flexible capacity, and managed services are all available for companies running the IBM i operating system and RPG, Java, PHP, and sometimes COBOL applications against the Db2 for i relational database.

  But there are clouds, and then there are things that should not rightly be called a cloud.

  And we think that if you are a modern cloud, then your primary storage has to be flash and that there is no place for a hard disk drive based on spinning …

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• Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.

  In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …

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• Withdrawal Symptoms: A Bunch Of IBM Services Tweaks, Storage Deleted

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every product comes to the end of its life cycle, whether it is hardware or software or even services because it is troublesome to repair or troubleshoot the old stuff as it wears out (in the case of hardware) or suffers from bit rot (in the case of software) or brain drain (in the case of services). And so it is with a bunch of different things that affect some big Power Systems shops.

  With a bunch of new Technical Account Manager (TAM) and ServicePac services offerings for the Power Systems line, which we wrote about back in August, …

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• Immutable Copies Are Only As Good As Your Validation

  May 23, 2022 Stan Wilkins

  A system can always be replaced, but the files and objects that comprise the application and the data that makes it useful can fall victim to all sorts of decay, neglect, or abuse in a modern system. And that is why we did backups to tape subsystems, or even tape libraries and then virtual tape libraries based on disk drives for so many years. And for those who cannot afford to have downtime or lost data, the IBM i base has been fortunate to have some of the best high availability clustering ever invented.

  With ransomware and malware attacks on …

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• More Price Hikes From IBM, Now For High End Storage

  May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases at IBM just keep coming as the company passes on higher component costs, and very likely higher manufacturing and support costs, that it is experiencing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic on to customers. Now we are seeing higher prices on high-end external storage.

  We have covered a number of IBM’s recent price hikes in the past several weeks, which you can see in the Related Stories section at the end of this report. But to characterize them briefly to put the new price increases into context, we have seen inflation in the prices for certain Power9 and …

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• There Were Actually More Power Systems Price Hikes Than We Thought

  April 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we told you about two price hikes on Power Systems hardware, software, and services that were announced on April 13 and take effect for hardware and software on May 7 and for selected Software Maintenances services on July 1.

  One of the price changes came in our announcement letter roundup and the other came through the business partner network, and on a hunch on Sunday night with another story still needing to be written, I logged into the IBM announcement letter system to see if anything had happened while I was away last week sitting in the sun …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – When Performance Issues Come From Without

  April 4, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  When I started my IT career 35 years ago, it was in the “centralized” universe that originated from the mainframe model. All core application codes ran in one — and only one — big iron that all users accessed with “dumb” terminals devoid of any GUI. Problem solving in AS/400 systems was frequently straightforward and not time consuming because most cases were anything but elusive.

  But the contemporary IT infrastructure universe has evolved into a big onion, with layers that we must peel while troubleshooting. I often find myself having to address a problem in multiple layers, and it no …

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