• Stacking Up Power10 And Power11 Systems Price/Performance

  November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been on the hunt to get you pricing on entry Power11 machines in the P10 and P20 IBM i software tiers to give you a sense of the relative price/performance of the Power11 machines compared to their Power10 predecessors. There are dozens of possible configurations of entry, midrange, and enterprise machines in these two families, and without an official and public price list, as Big Blue provided for many years, it is very difficult for even business partners to get pricing.

  In fact, they need to use IBM’s official configurator, and they need to have a Power System …

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• A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End

  November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.

  Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, …

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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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• 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 Hardware, Software, And Support Prices Hiked

  April 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall/summer we caught wind of the fact that IBM was going to raise prices on hardware and software effective this year, and then we never saw the announcement letter from Big Blue on General Price Harmonization or the one on price increases relating specifically to Power Systems and IBM i.

  As it turns out, those announcements were made on September 1 last year and they went into effect on January 1 – something that was not apparent to us (or the business partners that we talk to from time to time) until we were reviewing the subscription pricing deal …

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• End Of Support Announced For IBM Power Middleware Releases

  January 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last year, Big Blue moved its current and archived announcement letters as well as its sales manuals and other systems such as PRPQ tracking from the ancient IBMLink system (which used to run on its own mainframes for the many decades that we have used it) to a new system called IBM Documentation. The latter of which may perhaps have a better look and feel, but which has a much more difficult way of trying to keep track of what IBM is doing on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

  The new IBM Documentation system does not allow you to …

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• 2023: An IBM i Year in Review

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  With another year nearly in the books, it’s time to take a stroll through the IT Jungle archives and reconsider some of the 728 stories we published in 2023. Here’s a look back at the biggest IBM i news stories of 2023.

  January

  The top concern of IBM i professionals, according to Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Study, was once again security, a position it has held for six straight years. The latest crop of IBM Champions unveiled in January featured about 90 members from the IBM i community, out of a total of 839 for the year. Is …

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• Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks

  November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.

  In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …

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• IBM i Fall 2023 Event Calendar Shaping Up

  September 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The next variant of the coronavirus might try to stage a viral comeback, but that’s not stopping IBM i professionals from packing their bags and gearing up for a busy fall conference season, which starts this week with the IBM TechXchange in Vegas.

  IBM TechXchange is a major conference that offers hundreds of sessions for developers, data scientists, IT architects, operations professionals, and infrastructure architects, among other personas. The event, which takes place September 11 -14 at the MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, is expected to draw more than 5,000 attendees for educational and training sessions on AI, …

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• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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