• Just How Big Is The Whole Power Systems Business?

  September 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There may be a lot of economic uncertainty out there in the world, due to medical and political uncertainty that seems to be all over the globe, but there is one thing you can count on: Companies need more compute capacity to do ever-more intricate processing.

  In the second quarter ended in June, the server market turned in one of the best quarters in its history – even when you consider the inflation adjusted revenues from the peak Dot-Com Boom nearly two decades ago as 2000 was coming to a close. According to the research done by IDC, server spending …

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• Driving System TCO With IBM Global Asset Recovery Services

  September 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) When economic times are uncertain, that means by necessity that IT budgets are also uncertain, and saying that IT is the core of the business and that software is eating the world does nothing to change these hard, cold, capital facts. And that is why in these times people often turn to used, refurbished, certified pre-owned, or even remanufactured IT equipment instead of trying to get the acquisition of a PC, laptop, a smartphone, a switch, a storage array, or a server by the bean counters in the accounting department.

  This is no different than what …

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• IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

  August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

  This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …

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• Drilling Down Into The Power10 Chip Architecture

  August 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we told you some general things about the future Power10 chip from IBM based on a roadmap briefing that we got from the IBM tech team ahead of their presentation at the Hot Chips 32 chip conference last week. IBM was gracious enough to let us talk about the Power10 chip generally before that presentation, because we have a Monday morning deadline no matter what. And this week, we can drill down into the Power10 architectural details a bit more.

  The presentation at Hot Chips was given by William Starke, the chief architect of the Power10 processor who …

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• Power To The Tenth Power

  August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one of my favorite times of the year, with the Hot Chips symposium usually underway this week at Stanford University and all the vendors big and small trotting out their, well, hottest chippery. In this case, hot means “extremely interesting” but it often means “burning shedloads of watts” as well. But this is the time that the chip architects show off what they have been working on for four or five years and what has already been in production in recent months or will be in the coming months.

  IBM tends to jump the gun a bit …

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• HCL Certifies Domino 11 on IBM i/Power

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Domino 11 officially shipped in late 2019 by HCL Technologies, the company selected by IBM to continue development of the Domino family of products in 2017. Last month, the company announced that Domino 11 running on IBM i has been certified on select Power9 servers. Among the new capabilities that it brings is the new low-code Volt environment.

  The Domino family of products, including Notes, Sametime, Connections, and Traveler, has been through quite a bit over the past few years. After nearly a decade of neglect by IBM, HCL Tech made the development of Domino 10 a priority for the …

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• How IBM Stacks Power Cloud Up Against AWS And Azure

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have our own habits when it comes to thinking about bang for the buck, and it is refreshing sometimes to just think about how other companies think about it.

  As part of the July 14 announcements now almost three weeks ago, IBM not only rolled out new entry Power9 machines with higher I/O bandwidth as well as utility style pricing for on-premises gear to lower capital expenditures. IBM also did a direct comparison of the Power Systems Virtual Server running on the IBM Cloud for a memory-heavy instance and then compared that to fat memory slices running on Amazon …

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• Power Systems Slump Is Not As Bad As It Looks

  July 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even for companies selling hand sanitizer, face masks, toilet paper, and shotguns, it is still a weird time to be in business just like it is for the rest of us. The Cognitive Systems division within IBM’s Systems group – what most people still call the Power Systems division – is no different.

  Big Blue is certainly facing some strong headwinds as it has to get through more than another year before the Power10 rollout begins, and the Power9 machines have really been in the field two and a half years already if you count the launch of the Power …

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• Some Insight Into Utility Pricing On Entry Power Iron

  July 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, IBM announced a revamped lineup of entry Power9 systems, including a new single-core variant of the Power S922 server aimed at IBM i shops, and last week, we compared the performance and bang for the buck of this machine to other single-core systems for IBM i applications. This week, we complete the set by talking about that flexible, utility pricing that Big Blue started offering on big Power9 back in May and that is now available on dual-socket Power9 iron. The single-socket Power S914, as far as we know, is not eligible for this type of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 30

  July 27, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  As you know, IBM tweaked the entry part of the Power Systems lineup running Power9 processors, and The Four Hundred reported on this on announcement day, which was July 14.

  There are some PTF angles to this, which Steve Will, the System i architect at Big Blue, explained thus: “On July 14, several new IBM Power Systems announcements are happening, and to support those announcements, the IBM i 7.4 TR2 PTF Group (SF99737 PTF Group Level 2) and the IBM i 7.3 TR8 PTF Group (SF99727 PTF Group Level 8) will be made available on July 17.” We have …

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