• IBM i License Transfer Deal Comes To The Power S812 Mini

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the early days of the AS/400 midrange system, the processor, memory, networking, and disk and tape storage hardware embodied in the system was by far the most costly part of that system, far outweighing the cost of the systems software that ran atop it. We don’t have the precise numbers at hand, but it was something like 85 percent hardware cost and 15 percent software cost.

  Fast-forward a few decades, and the Moore’s Law improvements in every component in the hardware means that hardware is far less costly. But software doesn’t have a Moore’s Law scaling; in fact, …

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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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• Geared Down, Low Cost Power IBM i Box Rumored

  February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been talking for a long time about the impedance mismatch between some IBM i shops in terms of what processing, memory, storage, and I/O capacity they need and what IBM delivers to them with each new generation of Power Systems iron. For many shops, even the smallest machine that Big Blue currently delivers is too much of a box.

  This is a testament to the efficiency of the IBM i platform and its integrated relational database management system in that it takes very little iron to get useful work. It also shows that for many customers, transaction processing …

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