• IBM Brings Flexible Utility Pricing To Private Power Systems

  May 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A lot of people, including us, focus on the technologies that go into private, on-premises cloudy infrastructure and how that is almost always distinct from compute, storage, and networking technologies based on the same raw compute – Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or IBM Power, pick one – available on the public cloud. But there is an equally important gap between private and public clouds, and that is the pricing methodology for the two.

  IBM’s Cognitive Systems division, which controls the Power Systems platform, wants to close that pricing gap by adopting the same flexible, utility-style pricing for on-premises Power Systems …

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• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

  November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

  All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …

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• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

  August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.

  But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …

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• IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

  July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

  In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …

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