• No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

  We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …

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• Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21^st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.

  Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …

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• Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.

  What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …

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• IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away

  February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.

  The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …

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• It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy

  February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.

  Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …

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• Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i

  February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.

  I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …

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• Perhaps 2026 Is The Year For Power Systems To Boom A Little

  February 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In wrapping up IBM’s call with Wall Street analysts in the wake of Big Blue reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025 – which was a very good one for the most part, by the way – chief executive officer Arvind Krishna referred to the IBM Company as a “software-led, platform-centric company.”

  This is no news to any of us who have been using or programming or analyzing the business of IBM over the many decades. Of course this is true. But for IBM, the main platform that is driving the big bucks at the top and …

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• IBM Power Offsite Data Protection That Fits The Way IBM i Shops Already Work

  January 26, 2026 Don Gentile Steven Dickens

  For decades, IBM Power systems have supported some of the most critical systems of record in the global economy. Banking, insurance, healthcare, retail, and government organizations all rely on IBM i environments for stability, data integrity, and predictable operations. These are not necessarily the world’s flashiest workloads, but they are essential for keeping the lights on, transactions flowing, and making sure the trains run on time.

  Yet even in these well-managed environments, Offsite data protection remains a persistent challenge. Local backup and availability are rarely the issue. Most IBM Power shops have mature backup routines and, in many cases, high-availability …

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• It Looks Like 2026 Will Be a Good Year For Power-IBM i Upgrades

  January 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We look forward every year to having our hands on the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey results, which are gathered in the fall and presented in January the following year. This is the 12th IBM i Marketplace Survey, and we never forget that it was our own Dan Burger who talked to Tom Huntington at HelpSystems, now Forta, to get the survey started. We do our part to try to get you all to take the survey and we use it as grist for our models of the base, which we also share with you.

  This being a new year …

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• FalconStor Doubles Down On IBM Power With Habanero Offsite Data Protection

  January 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the secrets to the success and longevity of the OS/400 and IBM i platform is integration for the sake of simplicity. That may be two closely interrelated secrets, now that we think about it, but the important thing is that for any product or service to take off among the IBM i faithful, it has to integrate well with the platform and it has to mask complexity even when an underlying technology might be quite hairy.

  With the rise of many clouds and hosters based on Power Systems machinery and the desire to get offsite data protection to …

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