• IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors

  November 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we were pretty sure that IBM was working on some sort of accelerated system for GenAI applications and a week later we remembered that the obvious pairing was a Power System host with scads of IBM’s own “Spyre” AI accelerators running …

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• IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One

  February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.

  Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The …

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• Talking Certified Pre-Owned Equipment With Arrow

  November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Arrow Electronics is one of the three master distributors of IBM Power Systems machines and related storage in North America, and it also has decades of experience selling secondhand equipment as well as new gear through its partnership with IBM.

  Recently, Arrow has partnered with IBM so its resellers can offer their Power Systems and Storage customers certified pre-owned equipment that has been put through the remanufacturing processes of IBM’s Global Asset Recovery Services business. This is now the sole means by which Arrow is helping its resellers bring CPO machinery to Power Systems and Storage shops that, for many …

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• Reliability: An Added Value Of IBM Certified Pre-Owned

  August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many different kinds of reliability that are important in IT infrastructure. There is the obvious one that has to do with the literal quality of the hardware engineering, testing, and manufacturing processes as well as the quality of the systems software that runs atop servers or storage.

  But the other kinds of reliability that are equally important is knowing that the manufacturer is standing behind the equipment, supporting it whether it is new or certified pre-owned, in the event that something goes wrong. And as Murphy’s Law tells us and as all system administrators know full well, something …

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• Every Day Has To Be Earth Day

  April 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every day is Earth Day at IBM, as it has become for many companies that are trying to lessen their environmental impact and increase the sustainability of their businesses and of our planet at the same time.

  But that does not mean that we don’t celebrate the real Earth Day, which is on April 22 this year and which was first held on that day in 1970. Back then, at the birth of the environmental movement, 10 percent of the population of the United States took to the streets to demonstrate peacefully against the environmental and health impacts of a …

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• Tech Data’s Take On Certified Pre-Owned IT Gear

  February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be ironic, but even the largest sellers of new datacenter equipment in the world sometimes have to – and eagerly want to – sell used IT equipment. And if they are smart – and the executives at Tech Data certainly are on behalf of their downstream reseller and end user customers – they stick to certified pre-owned equipment with the backing of the original equipment manufacturers.

  When Tech Data was founded in Clearwater, Florida by Edward Raymond in 1974, the company sold various peripherals and supplies for minicomputer and mainframe systems. The company branched out into PC distribution …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 3

  January 23, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  You might be feeling like this is your lucky day, what with getting two PTF guides in one week and all. But there isn’t much new going on in the latest PTF Guide following Monday’s edition. There are no new links to share, but we do have a tip you might find helpful:

  Did you know you could set the defaults on the SAVE menu Opt 21 by using Opt 20 on the same menu? This will save you a lot of writing!

  There are no new defectives this week, but here is the usual rundown of the last defective …

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• The Chatter About Future Power9 Servers

  September 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In late July, the first of the Power9 systems, the one code-named “Witherspoon” that was designed explicitly to be installed in the “Summit” and “Sierra” clustered supercomputers installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively, started rolling off the production line at Big Blue and into those HPC centers that are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is the beginning, however quiet, of what we expect will be a rolling thunder rollout of Power9 systems in late 2017 and through early 2018.

  Because there have been so many processor announcements in the past …

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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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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Next (And Maybe Last) Mainframe

  February 13, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  For the past several mainframe generations IBM has announced new large systems about every three years. The current line of big iron, the System z13, emerged in 2015, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone if the z14 or whatever it is called reaches customers next year, in 2018. Meanwhile, this year Ginni Rometty turns 60, IBM’s traditional CEO retirement age, and, like her predecessor, she could stick around one more year as the company’s chairman.

  The upshot: Rometty’s successor as CEO will enjoy the sales boost of a fresh mainframe product cycle. And if IBM is making money …

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