• RPG Code Assist Is The Killer App For AI-Enhanced Power Systems

  October 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “I love it when a plan comes together.” – Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, The A Team.

  Look, we take our wisdom and our joy where we can find it here at The Four Hundred, and it does indeed look like Big Blue has a plan that is coming together with regards to generative AI and the Power Systems hardware platform as it relates to the IBM i software platform.

  We told you in Monday’s issue that IBM was up to something with regard to the Power Systems line, which was revealed to partners and presumably key …

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• IBM Nears The End of the Road for Server Reliability Improvements

  October 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Reliability has always been one of the hallmarks of IBM big iron, the midrange and mainframe systems hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses on around the world. These sturdy systems simply don’t go down very often, certainly less frequently than “industry-standard” (i.e. Intel-based) systems. In fact, the System z and Power systems are so reliable that, statistically speaking, there’s very little room for improvement.

  For data on uptime and reliability, we turn to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), which is led by longtime IT industry analyst Laura DiDio. ITIC has been conducting an annual server and operating system …

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• IBM Previews New Power Tech At TechXchange Event

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I wish we could tell you what was up, but we don’t know what it is. But we do know that all of the top tech brass at Big Blue related to the Power Systems platform are going to be participating in the keynote address at IBM’s TechXchange 2024 event in Las Vegas – what we used to call PartnerWorld – on Tuesday.

  Like a bad AI model with not enough parameters and not enough data broken down into tokens, we have to try to infer from first principles what IBM might be announcing and therefore what we might see …

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• Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

  But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …

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• Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.

  The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this …

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• Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron

  October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.

  Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …

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• IBM Is Running Out Of DDR4 Memory Faster Than It Thought

  September 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in August, we told you about how Big Blue was shifting away from the DDR4 main memory chips and towards DDR5 main memory chips for Power10 systems, which were designed expressly to support both types of memory.

  This is just like Power8 servers were designed to support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, with the latter coming halfway through the Power8 product cycle. The Power9 machines used DDR4 memory solely, and the Power10 is getting support for DDR5 a little late in its cycle, given that we expect Power11 servers next year. Presumably the Power11 servers will just support DDR5 …

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• Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.

  The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …

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• IBM Clarifies Where It’s Going with IBM i Subscriptions, Product Realignment

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As an avid IT Jungle reader, you’re probably aware that IBM is moving its IBM i software stack from a traditional licensing scheme to one based on subscriptions. The company is in the middle of the move at the moment, and it’s also in the middle of a product realignment, which has been the source of some confusion. IBM hosted a webinar recently that helped to clarify where it’s at now with the shift to subscriptions and the product realignment, and where it’s going in the future.

  IBM first announced back in May 2022 that it was shifting to subscription-based …

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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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