System z14 Archives

Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

January 29, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here at The Four Hundred, we take good news very seriously, and so we will just cut to the chase scene and tell you that IBM’s Power Systems business has grown for the second year in a row.

Take that in for a second. Savor it.

Think about the dozen years of dramatic decline we saw in the RISC/Unix and IBM i parts of the Power Systems business in the wake of the Great Recession in 2009, when the X86 platform from Intel finally got enough features – as did Windows Server and Linux – to compete effectively against …
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Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …
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Power Systems Bucks The IBM Trend And Grows

April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems business continues to grow, and that is good news for all IBM i shops, particularly for those of us who actively want for there to be boisterous competition in server processors and systems architecture. It comes as no surprise that we think Big Blue still has much to offer when it comes to engineering systems that provide real differentiation in the market. The ongoing growth of Power Systems – maintaining the happiness of the substantial IBM i and AIX customer bases and expanding the Linux base – is what is required for IBM to continue to make …
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Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …
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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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Power Systems Posts Growth In The First Quarter

April 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been waiting for four long years for the Power9 ramp to begin in earnest, and the merest hint of it happened Big Blue finished off its first quarter. That was when the “ZZ” Power9 entry systems announced back in February finally started shipping and IBM finally started booking some revenue for this new iron.

IBM did not provide much in the way of information about the Power9 system sales in the first quarter ended in March, which was only a week and a half after the ZZ systems started shipping. Jim Cavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer for the …
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Crazy Idea # 542: Port IBM i To The Mainframe

September 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In case you didn’t know it, and why would you care, IBM launched the new System z14 mainframe back in June, was talking about the new z14 motors it uses in August, and has just last week launched the LinuxOne “Emperor II” Linux-only mainframe variant of that platform. The machine, as always, has some impressive engineering. And it got me to thinking. Which is always dangerous.

Here is a crazy idea. No, this is really crazy, unlike some of my other inspirations, which of course make perfect sense. Maybe IBM should converge the Power Systems and System z lines, and …
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Power Systems Grows For The Second Year In A Row

Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

Power Systems Bucks The IBM Trend And Grows

Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

The Server Boom Goes From Sonic To Nuclear

Power Systems Posts Growth In The First Quarter

Crazy Idea # 542: Port IBM i To The Mainframe

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

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Search