• The Power S812 Gets Yet Another Stay Of Execution

  July 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power S812 entry server, which is based on the Power8 processor and which has no analog in the Power9-based Power Systems lineup, has received yet another reprieve from being removed from the Big Blue product catalog. It is a wonder why IBM doesn’t just say it will sell this Lazarus machine indefinitely and get it over with, to be honest.

  The Power S812, particularly the “Mini” variant that IBM announced on Valentine’s Day in 2017, are the skinniest – in terms of processing and memory capacity – of the Power Systems line that supports the IBM i operating …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals With Solution Edition Booster Pack

  June 8, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about the double memory and double I/O request for price quote (RPQ) special deals that IBM quietly rolled out in April without putting out any announcement letters and that are still in effect until June 30. So consider this a reminder that these deals are still out there and now is a good time to invest in new Power9 iron if you want to pay less for it than you otherwise might.

  But that is not all you can get. As it turns out, Big Blue is revamping its IBM i Solution Edition …

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• IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn

  May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …

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• IBM Adds Deals And Tools To Cloudy Power Service

  May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In February last year, Big Blue surprised many of us by announcing that it was putting Power8 and Power9 systems onto the IBM Cloud and offering up true cloud capacity, with utility pricing, for the capacity on Power S922 entry and Power E880 high-end servers. We did a detailed analysis of the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud offering here, and talked about the pricing for compute, storage, and networking for the service there. The offering was first available in June of last year, and subsequently the Power E980 has been added to the mix.

  Now, we …

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• Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

  In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …

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• Power9 Enters The Long Tail

  January 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no way to sugar coat this, so I will just say it: It is going to be a long year for the Power Systems platform this year, and I will be so pleasantly surprised and happy to be wrong about that. But I don’t think I will be.

  The Power Systems platform, as we have explained in the past, had a great 2018, with revenues up 9.5 percent to just a tad over $2 billion as far as we can tell from our financial model, which we have painstakingly developed. Now, mind you, the Power Systems market exited …

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• Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020

  January 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When the calendar flipped over from 2019 last week, the IBM i platform began its fifth decade, an amazing feat of longevity in our current age of punctuated technological equilibrium. As we set out to foresee what may become of IBM i in 2020, we have a couple of avenues we can take.

  On the one hand, we can try to guess what sorts of moves IBM will make with the platform. IBM isn’t in the habit of telegraphing its moves too far in advance, so this would be an act of speculation. On the other hand, we can look …

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