• Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices

  June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases that may or may not be happening to cover increasing costs at IBM continue apace. Some of the price increases we have seen over the past several months might be driven by increasing costs or the expectation of increasing costs, and others might be initiated to drive services and software revenues higher to push the profit level of the overall Power Systems business.

  It is hard to say for sure.

  But what we can say for certain is that last week, in announcement letter AD25-1142 dated June 2, Big Blue once again increased prices on various Power …

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• State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Systems

  February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we talked about the upgrade cycle for the IBM i operating systems over more than a decade based on the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey done by Fortra and pretty heavily massaged by us to reflect what we think is closer to reality for the IBM i market at large.

  No matter if you look at the raw data from the survey or the more elaborate model we have built derived from the past eleven surveys, one thing is clear: There is a regular pattern for Power Systems upgrades among OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …

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• IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .

  February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.

  So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.

  In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March …

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• Power10 Keeps Plugging Along As Power11 Looms For 2025

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to a slowdown in sales ahead of next year’s Power11 and “Telum-II” System z17 launches.

  Business seems to be going pretty well for Big Blue, all things considered, although it had to pump $2.73 billion into its pension …

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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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• 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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• IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

  May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

  Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …

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• Drilling Down Into New IBM i Perpetual And Subscription Pricing

  April 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, Big Blue increased pricing on its pricing for per-core perpetual software licenses, per user licensing fees, Software Maintenace, and subscription prices back on January 1. We missed the change – again, apologies for that – and let you know about the basics of these and other hardware and software price changes. This week we are going to look at the effect of these changes on the cost of the base IBM i systems software stack.

  To review: On September 9 last year, IBM announced the price increases that went into effect as …

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• What Do Secondhand Power9 Machines Cost These Days?

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Before IBM consolidated its Global Asset Recovery Services arm in the Systems group in the wake of the spinout of the Kyndryl outsourcing and services business, we could go out to the IBM web site every now and then and get a sense of what secondhand Power Systems machinery cost. But alas, that is no longer the case.

  And so, we went poking around the Internet late on a Friday night and stumbled across our old friends at Data Tech Computer Services in Alpharetta, Georgia, which have been in business nearly three decades peddling AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM …

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• The Low Down On Service Extension For IBM i 7.X Releases

  March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the wake of our discussion two weeks ago of the long-lived releases of IBM i and OS/400 and how they compare in terms of technical support and bug fix coverage to Linux and Windows Server, we got a bunch of questions about just when the service extension – what we call extended support like other operating system vendors – would end.

  We understood the very high price that customers pay for service extension – as brilliantly outlined in a piece by Steve Pitcher back in October 2023, which showed the high price that the cumulative cost stacks up …

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