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Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …
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Power9 Enters The Long Tail

January 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is no way to sugar coat this, so I will just say it: It is going to be a long year for the Power Systems platform this year, and I will be so pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong about that. But I don’t think I will be.

The Power Systems platform, as we have explained in the past, had a great 2018, with revenues up 9.5 percent to just a tad over $2 billion as far as we can tell from our financial model, which we have painstakingly developed. Now, mind you, the Power Systems market exited …
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Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i

December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.

They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …
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After Seven Quarters Of Growth, Power Systems Declines

October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The tough compares have hit home on IBM’s Power Systems business, but the good news is that this has happened after seven consecutive quarters of growth for the Power-based server business that Big Blue owns lock, stock, and barrel. Even with this decline, which was quite steep because of the triple whammy of tough compares (more on that in a moment), there is still a healthy underlying Power Systems business that is much better off than the last time it was hit by similar declines.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for IBM’s Power Systems division and then work …
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An 11-Core Power9 Makes The Rounds, And Other Hardware Enhancements

October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Those of us who go way back in the IBM midrange are used to rhythm in hardware announcements. In the early days, there were several announcements per year as new processors were rolled out across the product line and new peripherals for various kinds of storage and networking were rolled out. The pace was brisk back in the day, with nearly annual processor upgrades and associated updates to systems.

These days, systems are really updated every three years or so, but still, there is the vestigial spring/fall announcement cadence when Big Blue now does Technology Refreshes for the IBM i …
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IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …
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The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …
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The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So

April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.

This is not a bad thing. …
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