• The Price Tweaking Continues For Power Systems

  August 18, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I have said it before and I will say it again: If you think you can keep track of IBM’s pricing for hardware, software, and services given all the ups and downs with pricing, you have a better encyclopedic mind and spreadsheet than we do.

  In recent weeks, Big Blue has been at it again with the red grease pencil, making changes in the Power Systems and Storage hardware product lines. Both of the price changes we report on today actually were announced in early July and took effect immediately. They were buried in our torrent of email and I …

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• The Turning Point For Power Systems Is Here, And Now

  July 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  CORRECTED Considering how everyone in the IBM midrange systems market knew that Power11 processors and the next generation of Power Systems servers using them were coming some time around the middle of this year, the dip in Power Systems servers based on Power10 technology did pretty well, we think, in the first quarter and now the second quarter.

  We have to infer this, of course, because Big Blue does not provide revenue figures for sales of Power Systems iron, much less give a breakdown by sales of machines running IBM i, AIX, or Linux as their primary operating system. What …

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• Power11 Entry Machines: The Power S1124 And Power L1124

  July 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For several decades, a two-socket server was the workhorse machine in most datacenters, whether they were running a database machine for transaction processing or a scale-out cluster of machines for distributed Web applications and their related back-ends. And for many OS/400 and IBM i shops, the two-socket machine was the one that provided the right balance of compute and storage expansion and density.

  But, over the years, as Power processor cores have gotten more powerful, customers have needed fewer and fewer cores to run their relatively modest (by comparison) and relatively static (they grow along with the business, but not …

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• To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable

  July 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still assembling the information on the new Power11 processor and the Power Systems machines that use them and working on our analysis before they start shipping on July 25. We will do the most thorough job that we can under the circumstances, as always, but we concede that pricing information is very hard to come by on Power10 systems and we suspect it will be the same with Power11 systems, too.

  But we will remind IBM that any new generation of machines always has improved bang for the buck, and given the modest improvements in performance moving from …

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• Now, IBM Is Jacking Up Hardware Maintenance Prices

  June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first stirrings of hardware maintenance price increases that will affect IBM Power Systems shops have hit, starting in China for Power8 and Power9 machines and for Storage Expert Care support everywhere around the world except in Japan.

  To be quite honest, when we read the hardware maintenance price increase in announcement letter AD25-1195, we did not at first see that it was restricted to the People’s Republic Of China and assumed that it was for the United States and quite possibly for the entire planet. But, alas and good for everyone outside of China, the 10 percent price …

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• 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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• Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.

  In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …

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• A Bunch Of IBM i-Power Systems Things To Be Aware Of

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes you get a bunch of big announcements for the IBM i platform or the Power Systems machinery it runs on, and sometimes there are some smaller things that are interesting to a smaller group of people but no less important in their worlds than the big stuff.

  So it is this week.

  In announcement letter AD25-0887 dated May 27, which is where we also saw the withdrawal of marketing of RDX disk backup units and which we reported on elsewhere in this issue, we also see that the 1 TB and 2 TB removable disk cartridges are being removed. …

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• Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D

  May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”

  This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …

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• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

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