• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

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• Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.

  Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?

  In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …

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• IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

  Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus

  March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to a new series in The Four Hundred called In The IBM i Trenches.

  We spend a lot of time talking to people at IBM and at the key suppliers of systems software, application software, and development tools for the IBM i platform. But the ecosystem is a lot bigger than these players. There are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, depending. There are suppliers of third party maintenance as well as technical support and all kinds of programming and system management services. And there are an increasing number of hosting …

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• IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.

  IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …

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• Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride

  January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.

  It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …

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• Breathing New Life Into Your POWER7 And POWER7+ Systems

  November 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a hard lesson for people to learn, but savvy IT organizations certainly do learn it – some decades ago, some only now. And that lesson is that not every application slowdown and performance bottleneck in a system is directly related to the clock speed or throughput of the central processor. While the processors are indeed central, a system is comprised of main memory, storage, and network I/O, and tuning up a machine as many times as not means bolstering these other components to help the CPU better do the job that is latent in its particular feeds and …

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• Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get surprises very often in the Power Systems market, and even fewer in the IBM i sub-market. But last week, we did get a surprise – and it was a pleasant one – as Big Blue decided that it was going to allow for IBM i 7.1, which has long since been removed from marketing and which was just recently given extended extended support through April 2023, to run on selected models of the Power Systems line using Power9 processors.

  That IBM would allow for this is remarkable, and it shows the economic and technical difficulties that many …

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• IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.

  I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …

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• Max Thread Room

  September 28, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a lot of organizations that buy servers and create systems out of them, the overall throughput of each single machine is the most important performance metric they care about. But for a lot of IBM i shops and indeed even System z mainframe shops, the performance of a single core is the most important metric because most IBM i customers do not have very many cores at all. Some have only one, others have two, three, or four, and most do not have more than that although there are some very large Power Systems running IBM i. But that …

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