• 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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• It’s Harder To Hear The Pulse In The Server Market

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  More than any other piece of equipment that does into the datacenter, the server is an indicator of health and wealth. Over the more than three decades that The Four Hundred has been published, we have spent a lot of effort and time to understand how the world is investing in what kinds of servers, including Big Blue’s midrange systems running OS/400 and IBM i, and how the trends change over time. And we are committed to doing that going forward, even though it has just gotten a little bit more difficult.

  For the past several decades – I honestly …

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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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• We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050

  March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …

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• Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.

  It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …

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• Rocket Rebrands, Updates, and Discounts Terminal Emulator

  January 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Greenscreen interfaces may not look pretty, but they continue to be effective and people continue to use them. That longevity among IBM i and System Z shops is a big reason why Rocket Software last week decided to rebrand its BlueZone offering as the Rocket Terminal Emulator. Rocket is trying to drum up interest in the new software, which also supports the latest security protocols, by offering a steep discount on license and subscription fees, but only for a limited time.

  BlueZone, which Rocket Software obtained with its 2006 acquisition of Seagull Software, has been the go-to product for …

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• Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter

  December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.

  We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …

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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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• IBM Pulls Plug on Systems Magazine, Pushes Community Site

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM Systems magazine will cease publishing at the end of 2020, ending a two-decade-plus run as an IBM-backed magazine serving the IBM i, AIX, and System z communities, IBM announced this week. In its place, Big Blue plans to ramp up the IBM Community website, which, you will remember, absorbed the old developerWorks content earlier this year.

  IBM Systems Magazine has been produced by MSP TechMedia, a division of MSP Communications, under a license from IBM. The media partnership between the two companies, which has been ongoing for at least 22 years, included two magazines: the monthly IBM Systems …

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• Recovery Point Provides Another Option for Full-Service DR

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to full-service disaster recovery firms, most IBM i shops are aware of IBM Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) and Sungard, the two giants of the space. But there’s a third, slightly smaller option that nevertheless should be on their list: Recovery Point Systems of Germantown, Maryland.

  Recovery Point was formed nearly four decades ago to serve the document storage needs of businesses and organizations near the nation’s capital. As tape storage took off, the company evolved its business plan and served as secure repository for tape storage, sort of a regional Iron Mountain.

  Today, Recovery Point …

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