• 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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• Driving System TCO With IBM Global Asset Recovery Services

  September 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) When economic times are uncertain, that means by necessity that IT budgets are also uncertain, and saying that IT is the core of the business and that software is eating the world does nothing to change these hard, cold, capital facts. And that is why in these times people often turn to used, refurbished, certified pre-owned, or even remanufactured IT equipment instead of trying to get the acquisition of a PC, laptop, a smartphone, a switch, a storage array, or a server by the bean counters in the accounting department.

  This is no different than what …

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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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• New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.

  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …

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• Power To The Tenth Power

  August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is one of my favorite times of the year, with the Hot Chips symposium usually underway this week at Stanford University and all the vendors big and small trotting out their, well, hottest chippery. In this case, hot means “extremely interesting” but it often means “burning shedloads of watts” as well. But this is the time that the chip architects show off what they have been working on for four or five years and what has already been in production in recent months or will be in the coming months.

  IBM tends to jump the gun a bit …

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• Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

  August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

  Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

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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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• IBM Brings Flexible Utility Pricing To Private Power Systems

  May 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A lot of people, including us, focus on the technologies that go into private, on-premises cloudy infrastructure and how that is almost always distinct from compute, storage, and networking technologies based on the same raw compute – Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or IBM Power, pick one – available on the public cloud. But there is an equally important gap between private and public clouds, and that is the pricing methodology for the two.

  IBM’s Cognitive Systems division, which controls the Power Systems platform, wants to close that pricing gap by adopting the same flexible, utility-style pricing for on-premises Power Systems …

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• Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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