• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 11

  March 16, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  The Power11 processors and their systems have in the field since last summer, and for those of you fortunate enough to have a server with that “new car smell,” now is the time to learn about the new processor and systems and figure out how to optimize performance on these machines and take advantage of their special features.

  To that end, IBM has put out a new best practices guide called IBM Power11 Performance Optimization For IBM i to help you begin the processor of tuning up your new machine. You can download it here.

  In addition to this, …

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• No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

  March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

  We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …

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• Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i

  February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.

  I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …

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• IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales

  February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as …

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• Shaking The IBM i Magic Eight Ball For 2026

  January 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  After one more trip around the Sun, the IBM i community is back at it for another turn. What will become of our favorite box in 2026, let alone the people who work on it? That is not easy to say. As the great ballplayer/philosopher Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But we try anyway.

  We kick off 2026 IBM i predictions with some targeted insight from Bill Langston, director of marketing, New Generation Software:

  “I feel like 2026 will be a quiet year with the most adventurous IBM i customers …

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• It Looks Like 2026 Will Be a Good Year For Power-IBM i Upgrades

  January 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We look forward every year to having our hands on the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey results, which are gathered in the fall and presented in January the following year. This is the 12th IBM i Marketplace Survey, and we never forget that it was our own Dan Burger who talked to Tom Huntington at HelpSystems, now Forta, to get the survey started. We do our part to try to get you all to take the survey and we use it as grist for our models of the base, which we also share with you.

  This being a new year …

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• 2025: An IBM i Year In Review

  January 12, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The calendar has flipped over into the new year, bringing with it hope that the next twelve months will unfold in a positive way. It’s also a good time to reflect on what 2025 brought to the IBM i community, and to remember the big news events that occurred in our little sector of the IT market.

  January

  IBM hired a new vice president of product management for the Power Systems business. Bargav Balakrishnan was promoted to the position, which was previously held by Steve Sibley. Balakrishnan, who has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, …

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• Stacking Up Entry IBM i-Power11 Systems Against Windows X86 Platforms

  December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having spent the past several weeks going over the hardware and software costs and performance of systems in the IBM i P10 and P20 software tiers. We had an admittedly small sample, but one that we could get Big Blue’s pricing information for, which is hard to come by. This week we wanted to see how those entry P10-class and P20-class machines stack up against modern X86 servers based on Intel’s latest Xeon 6 systems running a Windows Server stack that was functionally equivalent to the IBM i stack.

  So we did a little spreadsheet work on your behalf.

  Our …

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• Stacking Up Power10 And Power11 Systems Price/Performance

  November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been on the hunt to get you pricing on entry Power11 machines in the P10 and P20 IBM i software tiers to give you a sense of the relative price/performance of the Power11 machines compared to their Power10 predecessors. There are dozens of possible configurations of entry, midrange, and enterprise machines in these two families, and without an official and public price list, as Big Blue provided for many years, it is very difficult for even business partners to get pricing.

  In fact, they need to use IBM’s official configurator, and they need to have a Power System …

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• A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End

  November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.

  Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …

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