• Power Systems Keep Growing To Finish Off 2018

  January 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line, buoyed by the deliver of high-end Power E980 systems for big AIX and IBM i jobs, a steady stream of IBM i system upgrades, and some traction in Power-based Linux clusters for HPC and data analytics workloads, turned in a pretty good final quarter for 2018, and capped three prior quarters of growth during 2018 to turn in a full year of growth.

  You can’t tell how much growth, of course, but in the lead story of this issue of The Four Hundred, I took my best stab at modeling the quarterly revenue stream of …

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• The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

  January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …

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• IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.

  In any event, on January 1, IBM …

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• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

  December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

  As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …

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• Some Insight Into The IBM i On Power Systems Base

  December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is pretty secretive about its systems business, but is really no worse than its peers in this regard. Big Blue wants to get enough information out there to keep customers comfortable about the future, keep Wall Street happy about its revenues and prospects for the immediate future (meaning one to three quarters out), and keep its competitors from getting too much insight into how it is doing in the systems racket.

  Every now and then, we get some insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, and as part of a discussion we had recently about upgrade and …

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• Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

  November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.

  They have no choice, living in the future as we do.

  The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …

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• Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

  Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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