• Does IBM i Need Its Own Zowe?

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Getting open source software onto platforms like IBM i and System z is a big focus of IBM, its big iron customers, and the ecosystem of tool and service providers that tread these waters. In 2018, IBM, CA Technologies, and Rocket Software collaborated to create the Zowe framework as a part of the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, with the goal to extend System z-based services into the greater open source IT landscape. Is it time for a similar effort on IBM i?

  When Zowe launched two years ago, the Open Mainframe Project (OMP) boasted that Zowe would “serve as …

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• Max Thread Room

  September 28, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a lot of organizations that buy servers and create systems out of them, the overall throughput of each single machine is the most important performance metric they care about. But for a lot of IBM i shops and indeed even System z mainframe shops, the performance of a single core is the most important metric because most IBM i customers do not have very many cores at all. Some have only one, others have two, three, or four, and most do not have more than that although there are some very large Power Systems running IBM i. But that …

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• Modernization Trumps Migration for IBM i and Mainframe, IDC Says

  September 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that modernized their IBM i and System z applications not only had higher satisfaction rates and lower costs than organizations that migrated off those platforms, but they also benefited from higher levels of innovation in things like AI, IoT, and mobile enablement, according to an IDC study commissioned by Rocket Software.

  In “The Quantified Business Benefits of Modernizing IBM Z and IBM i to Spur Innovation,” IDC analysts Peter Rutten and Randy Perry set out to quantitatively measure and compare various aspects, ramifications, and results of modernization and migration projects involving big iron from IBM. The analyst group …

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• Just How Big Is The Whole Power Systems Business?

  September 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There may be a lot of economic uncertainty out there in the world, due to medical and political uncertainty that seems to be all over the globe, but there is one thing you can count on: Companies need more compute capacity to do ever-more intricate processing.

  In the second quarter ended in June, the server market turned in one of the best quarters in its history – even when you consider the inflation adjusted revenues from the peak Dot-Com Boom nearly two decades ago as 2000 was coming to a close. According to the research done by IDC, server spending …

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• IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

  August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

  This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …

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• Power Systems Slump Is Not As Bad As It Looks

  July 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Even for companies selling hand sanitizer, face masks, toilet paper, and shotguns, it is still a weird time to be in business just like it is for the rest of us. The Cognitive Systems division within IBM’s Systems group – what most people still call the Power Systems division – is no different.

  Big Blue is certainly facing some strong headwinds as it has to get through more than another year before the Power10 rollout begins, and the Power9 machines have really been in the field two and a half years already if you count the launch of the Power …

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• The Ups And Downs Of The Server Cycle

  June 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you took a pause for your server upgrade plans in the first quarter as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to take root, you were not alone. But all things considered, the period ended in March was not as bad for server spending as you might have guessed, and we think that the second, third, and fourth quarters are the real test. The first quarter was just the warmup.

  Business has been pretty brisk for those who sell server components, and the ODMs and OEMs have been pretty busy, wrestling with their supply chains and trying to meet customer demand …

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• 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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