• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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• The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.

  Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …

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• Riding The Upgrade Cycle

  October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In an ideal world, all servers would always be new and all operating systems and applications would be patched and running in optimal form. But we don’t live in that world. And that means for many customers that don’t have bales of money sitting around, sometimes the IBM i platform starts to get a little long in the tooth.

  That is certainly the case for parts of the IBM i installed base. There are still a lot of Power5 and Power5+ customers out there who have resisted the temptation to upgrade their systems for the past five or six generations, …

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• The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.

  This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …

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• IBM’s Own Positioning Of Power Systems Revealed

  September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get a lot of data about how the Power Systems business is doing out of Big Blue these days, and we get even less, in terms of specifics, about the markets that IBM is chasing and how well or poorly it thinks it is doing in this regard. We get a snippet here and there from the quarterly results, we get some insight from the quarterly market trackers from IDC and Gartner, but not much else.

  Digging around through some documents relating to the Power9 rollout, we stumbled across a few interesting charts that gives us at least …

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• IBM Global Financing Deals To Push Power E950 And E980 Sales

  September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we have pointed out many times before, Big Blue is not just a creator and manufacturer of technology, but as one of the largest renters and lessors of equipment with vast access to capital and a relatively strong balance sheet, it is also effectively a large bank focused on IT. And more times than not, it takes IBM Global Financing – and the economic might that parent IBM brings to bear – to close the deal, as much as any hardware or software technology does.

  At the moment, IBM is focused on increasing sales of the midrange “Zeppelin” and …

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• County Battles IBM i Server’s Legacy Image – And It’s a Problem

  September 19, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Like many municipalities, Grand Traverse County in Michigan relies on an IBM i server to run day-to-day operations. And like many municipalities, it’s encountering a number of challenges as it seeks to modernize core applications, including usability and security concerns. But it’s also battling widely held perceptions that the IBM i platform is old and washed up.

  “We live in the computer age, but many of us live in a county that’s more Atari than PlayStation 4,” starts the September 8 editorial in the Traverse City Record-Eagle, a local newspaper that has documented the county’s IT challenges over the …

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• The Server Boom Goes From Sonic To Nuclear

  September 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The smartphone, the second wave of Internet applications, the shift to cloud computing, and the normal expansion of processing and storage as companies hoard more and more data in the hopes of doing something useful with it have all combined to send the server market skyward.

  In the second quarter, worldwide sales of servers experienced an astonishing 43.7 percent growth rate, to $22.53 billion dollars, the largest quarter for server sales in the history of information technology – even if you adjust for inflation and probably even if you take out the effects of DRAM and flash memory price hikes …

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• More Withdrawals For Vintage Power Gear

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In with the new and out with the old, as the adage goes. With the Power9 line of Power Systems machines all out and for the most part available – with the exception of the high end Power E980 that will be available in stages in September and November – it is time to start winding down more of the older stuff.

  In announcement letter 918-097, IBM started to remove more things from the product catalog. The most important one in this round will happen on October 19, and that is when companies will no longer be able to …

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