• IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.

  As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …

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• A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.

  There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.

  Announcement letter 120-017 has …

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• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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• Thoroughly Modern: How To Optimize IT In 2023

  January 16, 2023 Jeff Swartz

  It should be no surprise to anyone that applications running on IBM i are business critical. In many cases, these crucial systems keep the business alive day-to-day. Working with organizations around the globe, we are seeing a lot of activity happening in the IBM i space to optimize operations and put in new workload models. Many IT organizations are looking at upgrading. This includes implementing tech refreshes and moving to Power10 systems.

  Now is the time really to think about what the ideal model is for where to run which applications.

  Historically, when companies looked at infrastructure upgrades, they would …

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• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

  December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

  First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …

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• IBM “Harmonizes” Power Systems, Storage, And Software Prices Upward

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The worsening economic conditions and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against other currencies is forcing companies to do two things: Raise their prices in the United States in some cases, and raise their prices a little more than that in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan.

  Last week, IBM did the latter on Power Systems and storage hardware and software, with the price increase taking effect on January 1, 2023. So if you are outside of the United States, you have time to close whatever deals you have in progress at the lower prices if you hustle …

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• Readiness Assessment Accelerates Moving IBM i Workloads To The Cloud

  November 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are on the order of 120,000 unique IBM i customers in the world, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are absolutely – each and every one of them – unique. There are no two customers alike because they have lots of homegrown code, or a mix of their own code and that of an ISV, or maybe they have a heavily customized stack from an ISV.

  We defy you to find one customer – even one – that is running any software from a third party as it is, out of the shrink …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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