Power Virtual Server Archives

Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?

June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

IBM currently competes with a slew of independent IBM i clouds with its Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) offering. But as IBM’s PowerVS grows bigger and more capable, there is still a question: Can the independent IBM i clouds survive?

Clouds have been around in one form or another for as long as the IBM midrange server has existed. Whether it’s termed co-location, a computer bureau, an application service provider (ASP), a managed service provider (MSP), or the cloud, people have been running IBM gear on behalf of other people for a very, very long time.

Since the online bookseller Amazon …
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Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.

There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …
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IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …
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The Case For Software-Based IBM i HA/DR

July 25, 2022 Ash Giddings

Software-based replication surfaced in the 1990s and continues to be a very popular choice for IBM i shops of all sizes, across an array of industry sectors. But what are the benefits of using software solutions versus hardware alternatives for HA/DR? There are a number of benefits that are an outgrowth of an HA/DR strategy that go beyond HA/DR and where the software approach is better than the hardware approach.

The first one is business intelligence.

Due to its reliability, powerful integration capabilities and ability to secure, many choose Power Systems running IBM i as their main database server or …
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IBM i Licensing, Part 1: Operating System Subscriptions

June 6, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Every vendor that sells systems and/or the systems software that runs atop that machinery has had to cope with myriad transitions in product packaging and pricing with the establishment of the cloud. The transitions are difficult for both companies and their customers, but in the long run, pricing will be more flexible and equitable – and far more predictable for both vendors and users alike.

Big Blue has offered several licensing models over the years for the OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i platforms. In the early years, every piece of software had a perpetual license tied to a machine, usually …
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How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.

What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …
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IBM Extends Dynamic Capacity Pricing Scheme To Its Cloud

February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

What if you could buy computer processing credits from a systems vendor and use the credits to run workloads on your on-premise server or in the vendor’s cloud? Better yet, what if the vendor was IBM and the workloads were IBM i applications? Because that is essentially the hybrid computing pricing structure that IBM unveiled yesterday as part of its latest Power Systems announcements.

The new hybrid pricing option is an extension of the so-called Dynamic Capacity pricing scheme that IBM unveiled through its Power Private Cloud offering, which IBM launched in May 2020. As part of that offering, …
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Will Independent IBM i Clouds Survive PowerVS?

Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?

IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

The Case For Software-Based IBM i HA/DR

IBM i Licensing, Part 1: Operating System Subscriptions

How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?

IBM Extends Dynamic Capacity Pricing Scheme To Its Cloud

Content archive

Recent Posts

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