• The Rest Of October’s Power Systems Software Announcements

  October 19, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The software stack in the Cognitive Systems division, which most of us still call the Power Systems division, is a lot wider and deeper than the IBM i stack, even though IBM i does represent a lot of the software functionality and generates a lot of the revenue stream for Power Systems machinery.

  In addition to the Technology Refresh updates for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3, which were announced on October 6 and which will be available on November 13, Big Blue also updated a bunch of other pieces of systems software that run on Power Systems, which …

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• The Path Truly Opens To Alternate Power CPUs, But Is It Enough?

  July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have a few tens of millions of dollars to spare and you want to set up a foundry partnership with either Globalfoundries for 14 nanometer chip making technologies or with Samsung for 7 nanometer technologies and then create your own Power processor, things just got a little bit easier. Big Blue has open sourced one of its Power cores through the OpenPower foundation and now anybody and everybody can grab it and design a new central processing unit around that core.

  Don’t get too excited, but get a little excited. Let me explain.

  We still believe in the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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• Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.

  They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Red Hat Linux

  November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support.

  Just as a recap from last week’s …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

  This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …

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• IBM i On Google Cloud Not GA Yet

  October 9, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IT Jungle has learned that the IBM i portion of the IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offering that IBM and Google jointly unveiled earlier this year is not yet generally available. The AIX portion, however, is ready for customers.

  We have been tracking the progress of IBM i and Power Systems in Google Cloud since June 2018, when IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will mentioned during a panel discussion at the inaugural POWERUp conference that IBM was in close discussions with the Web giant to bring IBM i to its public cloud.

  In April at the Google Next 2019 …

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• Pricing Revealed For IBM i Slices On IBM Cloud

  June 17, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Today is the day. You can finally go out onto the IBM i Cloud and buy on-demand slices of Power-based systems from Big Blue itself and load up the IBM i operating system and integrated database and do actual work on it. And, if it floats your boat, you can run AIX partitions on the IBM Cloud, too, on the same Power S922 and Power E880 iron that IBM is making available and carving up with its homegrown PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor.

  IBM revealed its plans for IBM i and AIX on its own public cloud, called the Power …

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• The Transition To RHEL 8 Begins On Power Systems

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If it is not already obvious to you, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to be the default and preferred variant of the Linux operating system that will be available on IBM’s Power Systems and System z servers at some point in the not-too-distant future when Big Blue’s $34 billion acquisition of the commercial Linux distributor closes.

  As we pointed out last fall when the deal was announced, we don’t know precisely how IBM will rectify some of the overlaps between the two product lines after the deal closes. What will IBM will do with the WebSphere and JBoss Web …

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• IBM Gives A Peek Of The Future At POWERUp 2019

  May 20, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a COMMON, or even a POWERUp, conference without some glimpse into the future by IBM to give customers of its Power Systems line a sense of what lies ahead near the horizon. By doing so, Big Blue can provide comfort to customers that it is working on future technologies and services without revealing its hand too much to competitors.

  Steve Sibley, vice president of offerings for the Cognitive Systems division, which is the part of IBM that makes and sells Power Systems iron, participated in the opening session of the POWERUp 2019 conference in Anaheim on …

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