• A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.

  There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.

  Announcement letter 120-017 has …

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• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4

  February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.

  Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …

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• 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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