• 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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• Bang For The Buck On Entry Power10 And Power11 Machines

  November 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early October, after IBM released detailed performance specifications for Power11 machines running IBM i, we put together a detailed matrix of processor configurations from Power8 through Power11 machines, marking every different processor combination for all machines. There are dozens of possible server form factor and processor configurations across those four generations of machines, and it would be very difficult to get pricing information out of Big Blue for all of them.

  We poked around the IBM site for Power10 many months ago ahead of the Power11 announcements in July and then did it again after the Power11 …

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• A Hardware Refresh Is The Perfect Time To Re-Evaluate Your HA/DR Strategy

  November 10, 2025 Ash Giddings

  For most IBM i shops, hardware refresh cycles arrive with a mix of excitement and apprehension. New generations of IBM Power Systems like the recently announced Power11 machines offer the chance to increase power, improve efficiency, and take advantage of the latest features.

  But along with the upside, upgrades also trigger some tough decisions, particularly around software licensing. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions are often near the top of that list. These tools are critical for helping businesses to maintain resilience and continuity, yet many customers find themselves paying significantly more for their HA/DR software after a hardware …

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• What Price Power?

  November 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things that is great about the cloud is that the cost of a configured server instance with a given compute, memory, storage, and network capacity has a published list price, including volume discounts for reserving instances over relatively long periods of time. Similarly, sellers of X86 servers – mainly Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and mainly for entry and midrange X86 machines – still have online configurators that allow customers to see all of the pricing on components and to actually configure the machines they want to order, making tradeoffs for overall price and feature function and …

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• Power Systems Grows Nicely In Q3, Looks To Grow For All 2025, Too

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s a funny thing, or maybe not. In its conference call with Wall Street analysts going over the financial results for its third quarter ended in September, neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, said “Power” or “Power Systems” or “Power11” or anything directly relating to IBM i or AIX. Nary a peep, even though the Power11 upgrade cycle has begun in earnest and it looks like growth was pretty good in the third quarter and will be decent for all of 2025.

  For a long time now, Big Blue …

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• Sundry IBM i And Power Stack Announcements For Your Consideration

  October 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is always a little mop up after major IBM i and Power Systems announcements, and there is usually a trickle of announcements that are not tied to the bi-annual launches of Technology Refreshes, which we generally expect in April and October. This latest cycle is no exception, and we have the mop and bucket out to finish out the current cycle.

  In announcement letter AD25-0006, IBM says that it will allow customers to mix and match shared utility capacity for latency compute and main memory activated using Power Enterprise Pools 2.0 om-site capacity on demand with pay per …

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• A Bit More Insight Into IBM’s “Spyre” AI Accelerator For Power

  October 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If anything is clear right now, it is that Nvidia does not need to get any richer in the GenAI revolution, and neither does its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. But everyone else, including IBM and specifically its Power Systems business, desperately needs to do something to catch the GenAI wave and make some money in this once-in-a-millennia opportunity.

  Our thesis, as you well know, is that for IBM i shops, code assistants that can help document, update, modernize, or port RPG and COBOL application code to newer languages and modular programming techniques is the killer app for GenAI, …

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• Stacking Up Power11 Entry Server Performance To Older Iron

  October 6, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here we are heading into the fall and if you have budget set aside for a new system or an upgrade, now is the time to start thinking about spending it. For customers buying mainstream P10-class and P20-class systems, the Power11 machines that have been out for a few months now and are the machines you will need to consider. And if you have older Power8 or Power9 iron, you might even be considering an upgrade to a Power10.

  With all of this in mind, we have put together the mother of all performance tables to compare the current and …

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