• IBM Deal Prices Current Power8 Compute Like Future Power9

  November 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The old proverb, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” is thankfully and just a little bit humorously applicable. In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, there was a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the fact that IBM is not shipping shiny new Power9 machines here in the fourth quarter and will not until early 2018. Given that fact and that the Power8’s are very long in the tooth, we fully expect for Big Blue to cut IBM i customers some kind of deal. There is a small deal for those buying Linux-only versions of the …

  Read more

• IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?

  October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

  “A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …

  Read more

• Advice For The Power Systems Shop That Has To Buy Now

  October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having to buy a new computer as one generation is ending and the new one is not quite yet beginning puts users in a tough spot. Without knowing the feeds and speeds of the system, you can’t compare what you might be giving up if you buy now. And without knowing the price of the new machine, and the current price of its predecessor that you might buy, you can’t tell how hard you have to negotiate if you buy the current model instead of the one that is coming down the pike in a few months.

  IT budgets tend …

  Read more

• Big Blue Profits, Poised For The Power9

  October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Let’s just cut straight to the good news. Even though IBM’s revenues have declined for the 22nd quarter in a row, and its profits are declining even faster, the substantial investments that Big Blue has made in its System z14 mainframes and Power9 systems is about to start paying off.

  The System z14 mainframes made their debut in July and start shipping in the middle of September, converting from a drain on the company to a fairly large flow of cash. Power9 chip development ceased a while ago, and we presume most of the system engineering is done, and even …

  Read more

• Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

  October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.

  The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …

  Read more

• IBM i Slow to Catch On, But What Does It Mean?

  October 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s been nine-and-a-half years since IBM rebranded the name of the platform from System i to IBM i on Power Systems. However, many people in the IBM midrange community call the platform by something other than its official name, according to anecdotal evidence and Web search data. Is this evidence of continued name confusion, or is there something else at play?

  IBM has been running from the iSeries name since its 2006 rebranding exercise, which replaced iSeries with System i. That name went by the wayside in April 2008, when IBM announced the Power Systems platform and the merger of …

  Read more

• Crazy Idea # 542: Port IBM i To The Mainframe

  September 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you didn’t know it, and why would you care, IBM launched the new System z14 mainframe back in June, was talking about the new z14 motors it uses in August, and has just last week launched the LinuxOne “Emperor II” Linux-only mainframe variant of that platform. The machine, as always, has some impressive engineering. And it got me to thinking. Which is always dangerous.

  Here is a crazy idea. No, this is really crazy, unlike some of my other inspirations, which of course make perfect sense. Maybe IBM should converge the Power Systems and System z lines, and …

  Read more

• Subscription-Based Change Management Added To IBM i MSP Menu

  August 9, 2017 Dan Burger

  Software subscriptions can be a good solution for companies looking for operational benefits using cloud hosted services for their development systems, as well as their backup systems. Because this type of IT strategy is forecasted to become increasingly common – companies will search for greater efficiencies and cost savings – IBM i vendors Midrange Dynamics and iTech Solutions have partnered to provide a new set of subscription services.

  iTech will add subscription-based Midrange Dynamics Change Management Software (MDCMS) to the portfolio of solutions that the Power Systems solutions and services company offers.

  The subscription includes codes for HA/backup systems, as …

  Read more

• Getting Hyperconverged On Power Systems

  July 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, when pondering the possibilities of how Big Blue might reimagine and reinvigorate the IBM i platform, we outlined how this might be done – and how it might apply to a much broader customer base after it was done – in an article called The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition. We forgot one of the possible components of a modern, integrated system and, amusingly, IBM has just announced support for it.

  The bit of the software stack we forgot to mention was what is called hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI for short, and this server-storage halfblood has …

  Read more

• Say Sayonara To IBM i 7.1 Next Spring

  May 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We sometimes think that the IBM announcement system tries to pull a fast one on us. Like many people in this market, we watch this system like a hawk, looking for anything pertinent to Power Systems or IBM i. A very important announcement was made on April 11, well ahead of the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, two weeks ago, but no one we know saw it. A business partner saw it late last week and alerted us to it.

  In announcement letter 917-080, Big Blue announced the date when IBM i 7.1 will see its software …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles