• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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• Rocket Talks Up IBM i Biz in Wake of Restructuring

  February 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When Bain Equity bought a $2 billion stake in Rocket Software 16 months ago, it was largely viewed through a mainframe lens. Rocket was a mainframe software company, and Bain was investing in that mainframe business. But as the new general manager of the Power Systems Business Unit, Chris Wey, tells it, the company is getting ready to make some moves in the IBM i market, too.

  Wey joined Rocket Software at the beginning of the year, immediately following the 30-year-old company’s most recent restructuring following the Bain acquisition. Andy Youniss, who co-founded Rocket back in 1990 to capitalize on …

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• How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong

  February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

  In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …

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• The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

  I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …

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• What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

  Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …

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• Chasing AI Inference, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, the Power AC922 is one of the best platforms for running HPC simulation and modeling workloads or machine learning training workloads, as is attested by the adoption of this platform for two pre-exascale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy dubbed “Summit” and “Sierra” by their respective Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory homes.

  As you know from our past coverage of this platform, the Power AC922 gets the bulk of its compute capacity from the Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators embedded in the system, which can have four or six of the “Volta” V100 GPU …

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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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• There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …

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