• IBM Shutters Systems Research And Development Labs In China

  September 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What a change four decades makes, and what a bigger change even a decade has made, when it comes to the relationship between the United States and China.

  Four decades ago, when Big Blue started to do business for real in China, the only reason to believe that the Middle Kingdom might one day rival the United States economically and militarily was the vastness of its population, the breadth and depth of its natural resources, and the patience and tenacity of its command economy. China was the anchor economy of the so-called BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – …

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• How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.

  But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …

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• IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.

  This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …

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• IBM Tweaks Power10 Hardware: Fatter Memory, Other Stuff

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We haven’t seen a lot of hardware announcements this year from Big Blue for the Power Systems platform, and you really should not expect much in the way of new hardware when Power11 systems are expected to be launched in 2025 and the Power10 machines have been in the field since late 2021 for the Power E1080 and since July 2022 for the rest of the line.

  To be fair, we did have the entry “Bonnell” Power S1012 machine come out in May this year. So it has not been a total drought. But hardware launches are not on an …

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• Power Systems Continues Its Slight Upward Trend

  August 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is an old saying: No news is good news, and with a slew of medical issues in our family right now, we get that. But what is also true is that good news is good news, and when it comes to the Power Systems business this is – happily surprisingly ­– precisely what is happening.

  The overall IBM business is doing alright as well, which is also good for Big Blue and for the customers that depend upon its systems to do their mission critical computing.

  In the quarter ended in June, Big Blue’s sales were up a smidgen, …

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• Fans Revving Like Crazy On Your Power10? Check The Firmware

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a patch to firmware for Power Systems is defective, and when it does happen, we like to point it out.

  Defective PTFs happen fairly regularly with IBM i, as defective patches happen for other operating systems. Sometimes the effects of defective PTF patches are dramatic, sometimes they are just weird. Sometimes they are in between.

  Both IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 have a defective patch in the firmware for Power10 systems, and to be super precise it affects machine types 9105-22A (Power S1022), 9105-22B (Power S1022s), 9105-41B (Power S1014), 9105-42A (Power …

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• Celerity Buys Chilli IT To Expand Its Power Systems Business

  June 24, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Like so many companies that have been part of the AS/400 ecosystem, both Celerity and Chilli IT are relatively small firms with long histories in peddling Power-based systems from IBM and who expanded into providing managed services over the years. Celerity and Chilli IT are also similar in another way in that both are based in the United Kingdom and largely serve customers in the British Isles.

  Now, they are one company in the wake of a partnership that the two companies formed back in February that turned into an outright acquisition a few weeks ago, with Celerity buying Chilli …

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• Youthful IBM i Optimism In Fort Worth

  June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community showed up in force last month for COMMON’s annual conference. And they sure didn’t drive or fly to Fort Worth for the weather, which was hot and muggy. The POWERUp 2024 attendees – all 1,100 of them – came to the show to learn about the platform, which may be in the early stages of – dare we say it? – a youth moment.

  First things first: the attendance number. COMMON was shooting for about 1,000, which is about where its annual spring conference has been for the better part of a decade (the fall conferences …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012

  May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.

  Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …

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• Power Systems Poised To Embiggen This Year?

  May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were away on a hiatus and not publishing last week, and therefore we are now going to go through Big Blue’s financial results for the first quarter of 2024, and take a deep dive into its systems business and Power Systems in particular. Once again, the news is generally good, and that is comforting when this is the final third of the Power10 and System z16 product lines from IBM, with follow-on Power11 and System z17 processors expected sometime next year.

  In the March quarter, IBM reported overall revenues of $14.46 billion, up 4.1 percent year on year, with …

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