• Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

  August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

  But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …

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• Setting The Stage For The Next Decade Of Processing

  August 12, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is no secret that Moore’s Law is causing all kinds of grief with chip designers working in all parts of the IT stack. It was bad enough to run out of clock scaling when Dennard Scaling stopped, and the industry has done a great job in making processors more parallel and allowing for them to offload processing to various kinds of accelerators, either on the die, in the package, or in the chassis over high speed interconnects. But even this is running out of gas as processors keep pushing up against the reticle limits of lithography machines because the …

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• Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

  July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

  That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …

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• Pricing Revealed For IBM i Slices On IBM Cloud

  June 17, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Today is the day. You can finally go out onto the IBM i Cloud and buy on-demand slices of Power-based systems from Big Blue itself and load up the IBM i operating system and integrated database and do actual work on it. And, if it floats your boat, you can run AIX partitions on the IBM Cloud, too, on the same Power S922 and Power E880 iron that IBM is making available and carving up with its homegrown PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor.

  IBM revealed its plans for IBM i and AIX on its own public cloud, called the Power …

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• It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

  June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

  For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

  It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …

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• The Transition To RHEL 8 Begins On Power Systems

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If it is not already obvious to you, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to be the default and preferred variant of the Linux operating system that will be available on IBM’s Power Systems and System z servers at some point in the not-too-distant future when Big Blue’s $34 billion acquisition of the commercial Linux distributor closes.

  As we pointed out last fall when the deal was announced, we don’t know precisely how IBM will rectify some of the overlaps between the two product lines after the deal closes. What will IBM will do with the WebSphere and JBoss Web …

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• Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

  June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

  So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …

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• IBM Gives A Peek Of The Future At POWERUp 2019

  May 20, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a COMMON, or even a POWERUp, conference without some glimpse into the future by IBM to give customers of its Power Systems line a sense of what lies ahead near the horizon. By doing so, Big Blue can provide comfort to customers that it is working on future technologies and services without revealing its hand too much to competitors.

  Steve Sibley, vice president of offerings for the Cognitive Systems division, which is the part of IBM that makes and sells Power Systems iron, participated in the opening session of the POWERUp 2019 conference in Anaheim on …

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• Retranslation Could Boost Performance

  May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.

  One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …

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• Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i

  May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.

  As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …

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