• Power Systems Bucks The IBM Trend And Grows

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems business continues to grow, and that is good news for all IBM i shops, particularly for those of us who actively want for there to be boisterous competition in server processors and systems architecture. It comes as no surprise that we think Big Blue still has much to offer when it comes to engineering systems that provide real differentiation in the market. The ongoing growth of Power Systems – maintaining the happiness of the substantial IBM i and AIX customer bases and expanding the Linux base – is what is required for IBM to continue to make …

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• Yes, IBM i Shops Have AI Options, Too

  April 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies of all shapes and sizes are encouraged to adopt artificial intelligence these days. Most of today’s AI tech, however, was developed to run in open systems and X86 environments. But there are a growing number of AI options from IBM and its partners for customers that want to keep their data resident on the Power Systems platform.

  There’s no denying there’s a lot of hype around AI today. One can scarcely turn on the TV or open a magazine or Web page without being inundated with claims of how leading organizations are using AI to gain a competitive edge, …

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• Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

  These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …

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• Guru: IBM i Save File Compression Options

  April 1, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  As I finished populating some test tables with a large volume of data on a small and transient IBM i partition in the cloud, I thought life was good. But my countenance fell as I realized the tables plus OS hogged over 70 percent of the disk space. I wondered how to get all the data into a single save file for safe keeping.

  The buzzer in my mind was loud and clear: it ain’t gonna work, you don’t have enough room. As I loathed the thought of using multiple save files to save my test data, I remembered that …

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• Power Systems Not Getting 3D XPoint Memory Anytime Soon

  April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A lot of people don’t remember this, but Intel was founded in 1968 as a maker of semiconductor main memory for mainframes, and in the early 1970s the company commanded almost as much market share in main memory as it does in datacenter compute today. But as competitors in Japan did a better job ramping up new technologies, by the early 1980s Intel’s market share dropped to somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent, and it had no way to easily or affordably get back into the game, and by 1984 it had to wind down its memory operations. …

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• Rebuilding The Bottom Of The Pyramid

  March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how Big Blue had extended the life of the Power8-based entry Power S812 Mini, announced on Valentine’s Day last year specifically to give entry IBM i shops a cheaper alternative than buying the Power S814 or Power S824. It seems to me that IBM needs to do some rejiggering of the way it bundles and prices this entry machine to get the installed base of customers using vintage hardware and operating systems to get current and stay there.

  We are under the impression that the number …

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• Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.

  We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …

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• Wanted: Exciting New Publicist For Boring Old Server

  March 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  You don’t need a marketing guru to tell you the IBM i server has a publicity problem. Outside the cloistered midrange community, nobody knows that it even exists. Even some of the companies that run their businesses on it don’t know it exists. Unicorns and leprechauns, which don’t exist, have a greater mindshare than the IBM i server. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly how it was all designed.

  According to industry analyst Rob Enderle, the IBM i server is a world leader in one computing category: boredom.

  “You put it in, you leave it alone, and it just …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes

  March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …

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