• Power Systems Did Indeed Grow Revenues Last Year

  January 30, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September, when Blue Blue took a huge write-off to offload some of its pension and retirement burdens to an independent third party, it posted a pretty hefty $3.21 billion net loss. But IBM’s underlying business was functioning about as well as it could under the circumstances and it was reasonably profitable and looking ahead to pretty good Power10 and System z16 upgrade cycles. We forecast that IBM would actually grow revenues for Power Systems for 2022, and according to our model, IBM indeed has done it.

  And by a much larger margin than the company has grown overall, …

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• Thoroughly Modern: How To Optimize IT In 2023

  January 16, 2023 Jeff Swartz

  It should be no surprise to anyone that applications running on IBM i are business critical. In many cases, these crucial systems keep the business alive day-to-day. Working with organizations around the globe, we are seeing a lot of activity happening in the IBM i space to optimize operations and put in new workload models. Many IT organizations are looking at upgrading. This includes implementing tech refreshes and moving to Power10 systems.

  Now is the time really to think about what the ideal model is for where to run which applications.

  Historically, when companies looked at infrastructure upgrades, they would …

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• Is That What You Think Modernization Means?

  January 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When most IBM i shops think about “modernization,” what they are talking about is taking legacy applications and in some fashion – and quite possible with many different methods – making those applications work better on newer kinds of clients and/or using newer front-end technologies to make them function better or look better. The researchers at IDC have a more expansive definition of modernization, at least according to a whitepaper that the market researcher recently did on behalf of the Power Systems line at IBM.

  That whitepaper, entitled The Key Requirements of Modernization and the Role of IBM Power10, …

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• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year In Review: Part 2

  December 19, 2022 Alex Woodie

  In part one of this now annual recap of the IBM i world that we do here at IT Jungle, we reminisced on the biggest stories of the first six months of the year. There was quite a bit going on, with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and more. But getting into the last half of the year – now that’s where the real action began.

  July

  The first full month of summer started off with a bang when IBM, after much anticipation, unveiled the long-awaited scale-out Power10 machines. The Power10 rollout included the S1014, with …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

  December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

  First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …

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• IBM Publishes Power10 Performance Optimize Guide

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops looking to squeeze the most performance out of their Power10 servers have a lot of options available at their disposal. IBM covers many, if not all, of them in its latest performance paper, titled “IBM Power10 performance optimization for IBM i,” which it released last week.

  The Power10 is the most powerful processor IBM ever built. Compared to the Power9 processor, the Power10 delivers 20 percent to 30 percent higher performance per core. And with 25 percent more cores per socket, that means oodles of more processing power to do useful work.

  At a system level, the …

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• Surprise! There’s a Tech Refresh 13 For IBM i 7.3

  December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we bet you were not expecting that. Or, based on past history, maybe you were. But when IBM put out the two Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 last Friday on December 2 as planned – that would be TR1 for the latter and TR7 for the former – the company also sneaked out an unofficial TR13 update to IBM i 7.3. With this Tech Refresh, IBM i 7.3 has many of the same updates that came to the two more current releases of IBM i.

  If you look at the IBM i Technology …

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• IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan.

  Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle …

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