• IBM Grows, Power Systems Slows

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good news, if you are a customer of IBM who wants Big Blue to stick around in the systems business, is that IBM actually saw some growth in its overall business for the first time in two years. This growth was driven in large part by its System z mainframe line, in the first quarter of 2021. The less than good news – but not unexpected – is that the Power Systems business continued to shrink as customers await high-end Power10 systems later this year and low-end Power10 machines early next year.

  In the quarter ended in March, IBM’s …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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• Some More Power Systems Stuff Swept Into The Dustbin

  March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power10 machines starting to come out later this year, the Power9 machines in the field for three years or so depending on the make and model, and the Power8 machines looking long in the tooth (but still technically and economically viable), you have to expect that Big Blue will wind down the sale of more and more older features.

  In announcement letter 923-035, IBM has done just that. Nothing too big, but we think you need to be made aware of it just the same. And as you might expect, IBM also put a plug into the …

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• IBM i Wish List: Add A Virtual IBM i Platform Like System z Wazi

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Serendipity is a funny thing; part serene and part dippy, I suppose. I was poking around for something interesting that might be relevant to the IBM i platform, and ran across announcement letter 221-122, which was for something called IBM Wazi Developer  for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. I had recently heard of CodeReady Workspaces because of the recent Power Systems announcements, but I had no idea what Wazi was.

  What I now know is that I want this in an IBM i flavor.

  There is no such thing as a portable and cheap and ubiquitous System z mainframe environment, …

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• IBM Readies Power Systems Announcements For February 23

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The word on the street is that IBM is getting ready to do a slew of announcements relating to its Power Systems platform at the end of this month, specifically on February 23. Generally speaking, the announcements are going to focus on IT infrastructure modernization, cloud computing, and application modernization, which are obviously things that a lot of the IBM i base in particular has to consider here in 2021.

  As best as we can figure, IBM is going to tell business partners in the Power Systems channel a bit about what is happening on February 9, two weeks before …

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• IBM Keeps OpenShift Up To Speed On Power Systems

  November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For more than two years now, as we have previously reported, there have been a number of ways to bring Kubernetes container control to the Power Systems platform, including Docker Enterprise Edition, IBM Cloud Private, and Red Hat OpenShift. In the wake of the Red Hat acquisition, it is pretty clear that OpenShift will be the container environment of choice on IBM System z and Power Systems machines on premises and on these machines as well as X86 iron deployed on the IBM Cloud.

  To that end, we find in announcement letter 220-439 that IBM’s Red Hat unit has …

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• 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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• IBM Goes All-In On Hybrid Cloud

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that was a bit of a surprise, and probably something that only obliquely matters to IBM i shops at the moment, but Big Blue’s top brass has decided to carve out its managed infrastructure services business from Global Services and spin it out as a new, publicly traded company.

  This business, which is tentatively being called NewCo until a real name is provided, is expected to be cut loose in a tax free manner and distributed to IBM’s shareholders by the end of 2021, so we have some time to assess the ramifications, if any, for the IBM i …

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• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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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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