• Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.

  In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …

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• A Bunch Of IBM i-Power Systems Things To Be Aware Of

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes you get a bunch of big announcements for the IBM i platform or the Power Systems machinery it runs on, and sometimes there are some smaller things that are interesting to a smaller group of people but no less important in their worlds than the big stuff.

  So it is this week.

  In announcement letter AD25-0887 dated May 27, which is where we also saw the withdrawal of marketing of RDX disk backup units and which we reported on elsewhere in this issue, we also see that the 1 TB and 2 TB removable disk cartridges are being removed. …

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• Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers, with general availability expected in the second half of the year.

  There has been quite a bit of development in the IBM i coding co-pilot this month. On May 7, during the IBM Think conference, two IBM executives wrote a blog post announcing WCA for …

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• IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.

  This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …

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• Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”

  This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …

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• Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have a feeling that Big Blue let the cat out of the bag a little early on a price increase for its Power Expert Care technical support services for the Power10 platform. We have this feeling because IBM on May 1 canceled a price increase in the Americas region in announcement letter AD25-1009 and in the Japan region in announcement letter AD25-1048.

  This is weird, and we are showing you the Americas announcement below in case IBM takes it down:

  

  First of all, the letter number referenced for May 1 does not match the actual letter number, which …

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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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• z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems

  April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.

  This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …

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• Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems

  April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.

  Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.

  To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024 …

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• More Not April Fools: Even More Price Hikes For Power Systems

  March 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  OK, this is getting crazy. On March 3, IBM announced price increases for various parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform. IBM also announced additional price increases to rebalance its pricing with respect to the US dollar for eighteen foreign currencies around the world in the same announcement. These price increases will take effect on April 1.

  These price increases from March 3 were in addition to ones that it made in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the …

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