• More Price Hikes From IBM, Now For High End Storage

  May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The price increases at IBM just keep coming as the company passes on higher component costs, and very likely higher manufacturing and support costs, that it is experiencing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic on to customers. Now we are seeing higher prices on high-end external storage.

  We have covered a number of IBM’s recent price hikes in the past several weeks, which you can see in the Related Stories section at the end of this report. But to characterize them briefly to put the new price increases into context, we have seen inflation in the prices for certain Power9 and …

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• Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices

  April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.

  With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …

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• 7.1 Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We think there is a lot of Power7, Power7+, and Power8 iron out there in the Power Systems running IBM i base, and we think there is a lot of IBM i 6.1 and IBM i 7.1 running on that iron. Our assertion is based on years of anecdotal evidence from the resellers and business partners we talk to, the customers we talk to, and a whole lot of spreadsheet witchcraft that we do based on survey data we see.

  The point is not just to come up with this data and then drop it and run, but to face …

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• IBM i RFE Site Moving to New Location

  April 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month announced that it’s moving its Request for Enhancements (RFE) program to a new place. From now on, IBM i users will be asked to submit and vote on RFEs via its new IBM Ideas website, where IBM is centralizing the RFE programs for various products, including IBM i.

  In the summer of 2016, IBM opened a new RFE program on its developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/. That website marked Big Blue’s first formalization of its requirements process, which up until that point was spread across four entities: the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC), COMMON Europe Advisory …

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• IBM Drives AIOps Into License Management

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced an expansion of its partnership with Flexera that will see IBM’s AIOps solutions integrated with Flexera’s software asset management software. The integration will give customers more insight into customers’ software licensing and SaaS subscription entitlements, from the cloud all the way to Power servers and mainframes, IBM says.

  The new integration specially targets IBM’s Turbonomic application resource management (ARM) software and the Flexera One offering from Flexera. According to Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM Automation, the integration will close the gap that existed between what software and SaaS solutions customers are entitled to …

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• Talking IBM i Shop With New Power Systems GM Ken King

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every new general manager of the AS/400 division and its successors all the way up to the current Power Systems division – which hopefully is no longer called Cognitive Systems in the financials but nowhere else – inherits a unique configuration of that business in time and space and after one, two, or three years leaves it in another configuration.

  In all of our years of writing The Four Hundred, we have made an effort to get to know each and every one of them. Last July, ahead of the spinout of the Kyndryl managed services business in November, …

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• The IBM i Cloud Just Got More Frictionless With Virtual Serial Numbers

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the cloud is to be successful, it has to do more than provide a new deployment and pricing model for IT organizations. It has to also maintain and retain some of the important practices in use by the IT department. One of the big disconnections between on premises IBM equipment and capacity sold in the cloud has been the serial number that identifies a machine, which is a kind of birth certificate and Social Security number for each box that comes off the IBM factory lines.

  That serial number is used to identify the machine for technical support purposes …

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• Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.

  To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …

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• IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database

  January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.

  The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …

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• IBM Delivers a Db2 Mirror Update

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM updated its Db2 Mirror continuous availability solution last month with support for ObjectConnect, which shrinks the amount of disk space required to copy objects from one IBM i server to another. It also updated the high-speed networking protocols at the heart of the Db2 Mirror solution, which should improve the security of data flowing over networks and makes Db2 Mirror clusters more feasible over longer distances.

  IBM has provided ObjectConnect commands on the IBM i server for years as a way to replicate IBM i objects. The software is useful because it improves the efficiency of copy operations by …

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