System x Archives - IT Jungle

RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …
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IBM Switches To Build To Order For Entry Power Systems

February 24, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If we trust our memory, for the past several decades both high-end Power systems machines as well as all System z mainframes have been done on a build-to-order basis, and for the past decade at least, these big iron boxes were made at IBM’s factories in Poughkeepsie, New York, for the worldwide market.

For many years, entry and midrange AS/400 line was manufactured in three plants: the main factory in Rochester, Minnesota for the market in Canada and the United States and for certain high end machines in Europe, as well as Santa Palombo outside of Milan, Italy for entry …
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Power Systems Continues Its Slight Upward Trend

August 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is an old saying: No news is good news, and with a slew of medical issues in our family right now, we get that. But what is also true is that good news is good news, and when it comes to the Power Systems business this is – happily surprisingly – precisely what is happening.

The overall IBM business is doing alright as well, which is also good for Big Blue and for the customers that depend upon its systems to do their mission critical computing.

In the quarter ended in June, Big Blue’s sales were up a smidgen, …
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Court Throws Out Lawsuit From Chinese Power Systems Partner Against Big Blue

November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is not often that we get any insight into the geopolitical workings of the Power Systems business that is central to this publication and to all of you who work on the IBM i platform. Often, the only way we learn anything is when two parties sue each other in court. Such is the case with the lawsuit filed against Big Blue back in September 2021 by Beijing Neu Cloud Oriental System Technology. The lawsuit, as it turns out, was tossed out of court last week.

China has presented as many challenges as it has opportunities for all …
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IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …
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Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …
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The Server Boom Goes From Sonic To Nuclear

September 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The smartphone, the second wave of Internet applications, the shift to cloud computing, and the normal expansion of processing and storage as companies hoard more and more data in the hopes of doing something useful with it have all combined to send the server market skyward.

In the second quarter, worldwide sales of servers experienced an astonishing 43.7 percent growth rate, to $22.53 billion dollars, the largest quarter for server sales in the history of information technology – even if you adjust for inflation and probably even if you take out the effects of DRAM and flash memory price hikes …
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As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow

June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.

This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …
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