• The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.

  The hope is that this is temporary, …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Analytics Moves To The Cloud, And IBM i Data Goes With It

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The cloud is changing the face of IT, much to the chagrin of IBM i traditionalists who are accustomed to having full control over their applications and data. Change is always hard, but the good news is that, with a little discipline, the cloud presents a number of new and exciting analytical options for your important IBM i data.

  As a transaction processing powerhouse, the IBM i server is accustomed to hosting the most important data a business ever touches, including data about customers and their purchases. On-prem servers still run the lion’s share of online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads, …

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• What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

  Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• New System z15 Mainframe Takes The Heat Off Power Systems

  September 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know if many of you work this way, but sometimes I have to say things out loud and follow that train of thought before I decide it is a good, bad, or neutral idea – or any of the different gradations in there and beyond these from absolutely wonderful on one end to impossible or worse yet impossible on the other end. It is a kind of branch prediction, and like modern processors for the past two decades, it is subject to Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities.

  (That right there was a nerd joke. I think. Maybe. . …

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• IBM And Inspur Power Systems Buck The Server Decline Trends

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the first time in 11 quarters – in other words, since the final quarter of 2016 – the server market contracted. And not just because the hyperscalers and cloud builders were cutting back on spending as they consumed the vast amount of compute capacity that they bought in 2018. Enterprises pulled back on spending, too, and every geographic region and every category of server had declines as well, many of these due to their own independent cycles and some due to macroeconomic effects.

  As we reported back in July, the Power Systems business grew 3 percent at constant …

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• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …

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• IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

  Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …

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• The Transition To RHEL 8 Begins On Power Systems

  June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If it is not already obvious to you, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to be the default and preferred variant of the Linux operating system that will be available on IBM’s Power Systems and System z servers at some point in the not-too-distant future when Big Blue’s $34 billion acquisition of the commercial Linux distributor closes.

  As we pointed out last fall when the deal was announced, we don’t know precisely how IBM will rectify some of the overlaps between the two product lines after the deal closes. What will IBM will do with the WebSphere and JBoss Web …

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