• Power9 Servers Get Updated Flash Drives

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may be on the verge of launching its entry and midrange Power10 servers in July, as we reported last week, but that doesn’t mean it will not continue to sell Power9-based machines for now and out past the general availability of the Power10-based systems.

  To that end, in announcement letter 122-042, IBM is adding new enterprise-grade flash drives in the U.2 form factor that is roughly analogous to a 2.5-inch disk drive. These new drives, which come from an unnamed source, support the NVM-Express protocol that speeds up flash drives (because they stop talking the SCSI disk …

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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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• Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices

  April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.

  With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …

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• The IBM i Cloud Just Got More Frictionless With Virtual Serial Numbers

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the cloud is to be successful, it has to do more than provide a new deployment and pricing model for IT organizations. It has to also maintain and retain some of the important practices in use by the IT department. One of the big disconnections between on premises IBM equipment and capacity sold in the cloud has been the serial number that identifies a machine, which is a kind of birth certificate and Social Security number for each box that comes off the IBM factory lines.

  That serial number is used to identify the machine for technical support purposes …

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• Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.

  To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• The Cacophony Of Many Different Server Markets

  September 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how skittery the global economy is, how wonky the world’s supply chains are, and how capricious spending by the big public clouds and the hyperscalers can be (and how much the top eight server buyers in the world make up of the overall market), the fact that the server market only had a 2.5 percent decline in the second quarter is not a surprise.

  It’s just the normal noise in the data, and perhaps, if IDC is right, a slight shift away from using two-socket servers with a modest number of cores to single-socket servers with a larger number …

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• Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems Hardware Here And There

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, our apologies for taking so long to get to the hardware roundup from the April 13 Power Systems announcements, which brought us new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4. There were a few changes to the hardware lineup as well, and let’s go through them now.

  As you can see from announcement letter 121-013, IBM has done a refresh on the 2.5-inch flash drives used in the Power9-based server line. According to Douglas Gibbs, offering manager for peripherals at the Cognitive Systems division that is responsible for the Power Systems lineup, this …

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• Don’t Be A Blowhard

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.

  Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …

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