• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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• Power11 Takes Memory Bandwidth Up To, Well, Eleven

  December 2, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we went over the roadmaps for the future Power11 processor from IBM and its follow-on, the Power Next chip that we presume will be called Power 12 because, you know, history. This week we want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the Power11 strategy and what this might mean for the systems that Big Blue will be building in the future.

  If IBM’s change in strategy with Power Systems since the Power9 generation has not been obvious to you, it perhaps bears pointing out. In the Power8 and Power9 generations, IBM was trying to …

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• IBM Hikes Hardware, Software, And Services Prices

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Inflation might be somewhat tamed in the major economies of the world, but the price increases keep coming from Big Blue as it tries to balance out its costs and its need to profit to drive the stock that provides the real compensation for top executives against customers who are getting pretty sick of price increases in every aspect of their business and personal lives.

  We saw a price increase hit our emails, as did other IBM i shops, on October 29 last week, but if you look at announcement letter AD24-2249, it was dated September 3, 2024. Go …

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• Power10 Keeps Plugging Along As Power11 Looms For 2025

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to a slowdown in sales ahead of next year’s Power11 and “Telum-II” System z17 launches.

  Business seems to be going pretty well for Big Blue, all things considered, although it had to pump $2.73 billion into its pension …

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• IBM Nears The End of the Road for Server Reliability Improvements

  October 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Reliability has always been one of the hallmarks of IBM big iron, the midrange and mainframe systems hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses on around the world. These sturdy systems simply don’t go down very often, certainly less frequently than “industry-standard” (i.e. Intel-based) systems. In fact, the System z and Power systems are so reliable that, statistically speaking, there’s very little room for improvement.

  For data on uptime and reliability, we turn to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), which is led by longtime IT industry analyst Laura DiDio. ITIC has been conducting an annual server and operating system …

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• Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

  But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …

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• Power Systems Management Stack Updated Alongside TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i stack and new Technology Levels for AIX, then that means IBM has also updated a slew of systems software and middleware that runs atop these stacks. This being the fall, then we knew that TRs were coming for IBM and we therefore knew that updates were coming for PowerVM, VIOS, PowerVC, Cloud Management Console, and the Hardware Management Console.

  The enhancements for these collections of software were part of the October 8 announcements, were detailed in announcement letter AD24-0630, and will be available for electronic download on December 12 this …

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• IBM Preps Delivery of 10th-Gen DS8000 Array

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is gearing up to begin delivery of the tenth generation of the DS8000, its high-end storage arrays for IBM i, AIX, z/OS, and other servers. Due to ship October 25, the upgraded DS8000 features a number of features designed to enhance data storage in z/OS mainframe environments, but IBM i shops will also see some benefits, too.

  Now in its 20th year, the DS8000 still roams the highest echelons of storage area networks (SAN) for large enterprises. Built with high availability and performance in mind, the DS8000 is designed to power the most important applications for the biggest companies …

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• IBM Is Running Out Of DDR4 Memory Faster Than It Thought

  September 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in August, we told you about how Big Blue was shifting away from the DDR4 main memory chips and towards DDR5 main memory chips for Power10 systems, which were designed expressly to support both types of memory.

  This is just like Power8 servers were designed to support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, with the latter coming halfway through the Power8 product cycle. The Power9 machines used DDR4 memory solely, and the Power10 is getting support for DDR5 a little late in its cycle, given that we expect Power11 servers next year. Presumably the Power11 servers will just support DDR5 …

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• Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.

  The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …

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