• Sundry Withdrawals For Power7 And Power7+ Gear

  August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The sunrise of the Power9 systems is moving in slow motion and we no longer expect to see shiny new iron using this state of the art processor running either IBM i or AIX until sometime early in 2018. It is looking like maybe March or April at the moment. But the sunsetting of vintage Power Systems iron that will be displaced by the arrival of the Power9 machines is proceeding.

  Trying to figure out what is being ripped out of the IBM catalog, and when it will be removed from the sales channel, is more difficult than trying to …

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• Why Not Overclock Power Chips For IBM i?

  August 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remember way back in 2000, when Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer and now the world’s dominant supplier of processors in the datacenter, said that it would be able to deliver processors that run at 10 GHz by 2011. Well, that was six years ago, and that sure as hell did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. But if anyone can crank the clocks high on a processor, it is IBM with its Power and System z engines, and we think it can push them a little higher and give certain customers who …

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• The Power Neine Conundrum

  July 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you take a very liberal interpretation of what the term cognitive systems means, including database, middleware, analytics software and the underlying system hardware and software, then IBM has spent untold tens of billions of dollars – probably hundreds of billions, really – creating its Cognitive Systems stack. We wonder what all of that analytics and machine learning software would say, with Watson’s voice of course, if it was pointed at IBM’s entire financial and technical history.

  What is the prognosis, Doctor Watson?

  We here at IT Jungle are an optimistic lot, and we realize that IBM, like many of …

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• IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

  With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …

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• Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear

  April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.

  But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …

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• Ensono Emerges With IBM i Cloud Offering

  March 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to selecting a cloud provider to run your IBM i applications, you have a lot of options, including prominent business partners and well-known VARs in the midrange market. One fairly large IBM i cloud provider that you’re probably not aware of is Ensono, and it’s working to raise its profile in the changing market.

  The first thing that differentiates Ensono is its rich history. While the company’s name is just over a year old, it actually traces its business process outsourcing roots back 47 years to Downers Grove, Illinois, when the data services firm May & Speh …

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• Some Power Systems Tweaks And Sales Withdrawals

  February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We didn’t expect any major announcements from IBM’s Power Systems division here in the first couple of weeks of the year, but the company has made done a bunch of little things that might affect some IBM i shops that you ought to be aware of just the same.

  In announcement letter 117-013, which was put out on January 24, IBM made good on its promise to make the new I/O peripherals and memory cards that came out with the midrange Power 850C system announced last year available on the prior generation Power 850 box, which debuted in May …

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