• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

    February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

    And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …

    Read more
  • 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. …

    Read more
  • A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

    November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

    First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

    When …

    Read more
  • Without Further Ado: Power10 Entry Server Pricing

    September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    We have been through the new Power10 entry servers from just about every angle imaginable, which has been our great pleasure. And now, we come to the moment we have all been waiting for: What is the bang for the buck of a Power10 machine? As is usually the case when you ask any question, the answer is: It depends.

    To try to figure this out, we put together pricing information for all of the different variations of processors for the Power8, Power9, and now Power10 entry servers with one of two processors. And when we say all of …

    Read more
  • Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1022s

    July 25, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    This is second part of our in-depth coverage of the entry and midrange Power10 machines that Big Blue launched on July 12, and today we are going to take a look at the Power 1022s, a new class of machine in the Power Systems lineup that shoots the gap between the lowest-end Power S1014, which we reviewed last week, and the Power S1022 and Power L1022 that offer more expandability and more features.

    We will cover these machines next week, followed by the Power S1024 and Power L1024 the week after that, and finish off with the Power E1050 – …

    Read more
  • We Still Want IBM i On The Impending Power E1050

    June 27, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    In March last year, as Big Blue was finishing up the development of the Power10 family of Power Systems machines, we wrote an essay explaining that we wanted IBM i to be a first-class operating system citizen on the four-socket Power E1050 machine, which we finally expect to see launch on July 12 if the rumors are correct.

    We never did like that IBM i was not supported on the Power8-based Power E850 four-socket server, and then also not supported on the Power9-based Power E950 four-socket server. And we equally do not like the fact that, if the rumors we …

    Read more
  • 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, …

    Read more
  • Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

    October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

    But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

    Read more
  • The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

    September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

    For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

    A lot more than you probably think, as it …

    Read more
  • SAP on IBM i to S/4 HANA Migration: ‘No Need to Rush’

    March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

    Organizations that run SAP applications on IBM i servers have about nine more years of maintenance and support available from SAP, and should be in no rush to move to SAP’s preferred application environment, S/4 HANA, IBM SAP on IBM i expert Christian Bartels told the community last month. “There is still a lot of time to go, so there is no need to migrate right now,” he said in a webinar.

    The SAP on IBM i community, which numbers around 1,500 or so organizations around the world, has expressed concern about SAP’s plan for the IBM i environment, particularly …

    Read more

Previous Articles

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • 40 Years Of DB2, But Even More For That No-Name Database Embedded In The System/38
  • API Dev Tool Delivers For Trucking Outfit
  • Guru: TryIT – You’ll Like It
  • It’s Time To Tell Us How It Is And What You’re Doing
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 40
  • Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i
  • Why You Should Be Concerned About the MGM ‘Vishing’ Attack
  • IBM Bolsters Database Security with Guardium 12.0
  • Four Hundred Monitor, September 27
  • The IBM i Marketplace Survey Needs Your Input

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2023 IT Jungle