• IBM “Price Harmonization” Increases For Power Systems Coming In The New Year

  September 21, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back a few years from now, in like maybe 2032 or so, we will look at 2026 as the year of the price increase. Big Blue, along with other system makers and the component makers whose gear goes into those systems, have all had price increases – often very large ones, and sometimes with what looks to me like opportunistic pricing. That’s when vendors raise prices by more than you would think was warranted.

  Sometime in early September – I think it might have been on September 1, 2, or 3 – IBM announced a price harmonization …

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• Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

  August 31, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

  Back in 1986, the “Fort Knox” project sought to converge the System/4300 air-cooled, entry mainframe lines with the System/38 (from 1978) and the System/36 (from 1983), and it failed. But in the failure, the Rochester Labs took some …

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• FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It

  August 10, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back in the Dot Com boom, when FalconStor was founded, it was one of the early innovators of what we have come to know as software-defined storage and software-defined networking as well as disaggregated storage. These terms were not even coined until a decade after FalconStor was doing it in its first product, called IPStor, which is the foundation of the various products that the company still sells today.

  Like many companies, including IBM itself, FalconStor had some self-imposed business issues and financial challenges over the years – IBM in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, FalconStor in …

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• Welcoming The New IBM i Chief Architect And Other New Top Brass

  August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

  As you have likely already heard, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will retired last week after a 41-year IBM career, and was succeeded in that role by Kris Whitney, who previously was the IBM i platform’s chief engineer. But this is just one change among several in IBM i leadership in recent months.

  For the past four years, Will officially had three roles at IBM, including chief architect for IBM i, IBM i chief technology officer, and IBM Distinguished Engineer. The last two titles, which Will gained in 2022, were significant at the time as they denoted Will’s position …

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• Power Systems Has A Great Quarter; System Z, Not So Much

  July 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 …

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• Relion Solutions Launches With A Focus On Customer Service

  July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Customer service sure isn’t what it used to be. Instead of helpful customer service representatives who pick up the phone before the second ring, you have overgrown phone trees, unhelpful AI agents, and ticketing systems that seem designed to shield customers from companies and companies from customers. You won’t find any of this at Relion Solutions, a new IBM midrange business partner that launched earlier this month with a desire to focus relentlessly on serving the needs of its IBM i customers.

  Relion Solutions was co-founded by Heather Dinho and Richie Palma, two IBM i veterans with years of experience …

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• FalconStor Creates Cloud Clean Room To Prove Backup Recoveries Work

  July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a bit sad to say this, but a lot of IBM i shops are still relying on tapes to backup their system software as well as their application software and the databases that drive them. There is nothing wrong with tape, and it makes sense to do offsite backups to tape and park them in Iron Mountain or some other facility. But the problem is that recovering from tape is a nightmare and no one knows if the recovery is going to work until the bad day when something goes wrong – through human error or hacking or …

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• More Power Systems Price Hikes, This Time They Are “Directional”

  June 22, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you well know by now, prices for CPUs, GPUs, main memory, and flash storage have gone completely bonkers thanks to the GenAI system buildout, with systems specially designated for AI workloads now comprising 70.2 percent of the $122.6 billion in system revenues during the first quarter. AI sales would be even larger, and so would sales of traditional systems, had it not been for component shortages that have been consequently driving prices higher. But if there was no shortages to begin with, maybe revenues would also not be so crazy, too, and shipments would be maybe 30 percent to …

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• Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

  June 22, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Over the years, there have been an untold number of books written about IBM and its computing legacy. (Our founding editor, TPM, has most of them in his library.) But very few, if any, of them focus much time on the line of midrange servers that came out of Rochester, Minnesota, including the AS/400, which turned 38 years young yesterday. That void is what drove former IBMer Bill Shaffer, who spent his entire career in the midrange, to write the book IBM & Computing.

  Shaffer spent 40 years at IBM, beginning as a programmer working out of the Miami, …

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• In The Trenches With: JAMS Software

  June 8, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world where applications and workflows are spread across multiple on premises systems and across the clouds, keeping track of how those applications and workflows are performing, fixing them when they stall or fail, and making sure everything is monitored and governing properly is a big job. And probably one that you don’t want to take on with so many other things going on.

  JAMS Software, which has been selling workload scheduling software for more than four decades, wants to help. JAMS was spun out of systems software conglomerate Forta a year ago last week, and has a …

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