• Power Systems Poised To Embiggen This Year?

  May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We were away on a hiatus and not publishing last week, and therefore we are now going to go through Big Blue’s financial results for the first quarter of 2024, and take a deep dive into its systems business and Power Systems in particular. Once again, the news is generally good, and that is comforting when this is the final third of the Power10 and System z16 product lines from IBM, with follow-on Power11 and System z17 processors expected sometime next year.

  In the March quarter, IBM reported overall revenues of $14.46 billion, up 4.1 percent year on year, with …

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• LightEdge Acquires Connectria To Round Out Each Other’s Power Play

  April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is a large group of IT customers who pay a premium for a premium product but who are also going to be experiencing a skills shortage in the coming years, then you want to be in the position of selling them networking, compute, and storage capacity in the cloud or in co-location facilities. And you also want to be able to sell them add-on managed services to get a bigger share of their overall budget while also helping them to get more things done.

  That, in a nutshell, is why LightEdge Solutions is acquiring Connectria Hosting. Both companies …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Systems

  February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The foundation of any system is its processor. It is the central processing unit, or CPU, which used to be part of what we called the main frame in a multi-frame system, that ultimately does the calculations that make computing useful. There have always been many things that wrap around this CPU that turn it into a complete system – memory, networking, other kinds of I/O, various levels of storage, all in their own hierarchies. But if you ask someone what kind of system they have, beyond the vendor and the brand, the next bit of data they will …

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• 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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• Top Priorities in 2024: Security and AI

  January 17, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Two sometimes opposing forces will be at play in 2024: the threat of cybersecurity breaches on the one hand and the promise of tech disruption thanks to AI on the other. Tech leaders, including IBM i professionals, who chart a course through these obstacles will be well-positioned to help their companies and their careers in the years to come.

  First, let’s cover security. It’s no secret that cybercriminals have been ramping up their game over the past few years. Since the Covid-19 pandemic gave online activity a turbo-boost four years ago, cybercriminals have been having a field day with people’s …

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• AWS Inks Deal With Connectria To Have a Power Play

  November 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The long road of history has not been made impassible by the charred marketing tanks and flaming sales assault vehicles of those who have tried to breach Fortress Rochester, but there are a whole lot of rusting machines off on the horizon cluttering the road and more than a few smoking machines nearby as well as some sizable holes in the ramparts out on that cornfield in Minnesota.

  While the proprietary minicomputer businesses and the Unix server businesses of the competition of the AS/400 and IBM i platform have all been destroyed and that IBM is indeed the last bastion …

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• In A Parallel Universe, There Is An IBM i Data Warehouse, Too

  November 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the many years that we have been watching the Power Systems business – which is all of them, starting with the original RS/6000 announcement in February 1990, the first announcement we ever attended and at IBM’s original headquarters at 590 Madison in New York City – we have seen time and time again how Big Blue has rolled out parallel cluster data warehouse configurations for its AIX customers.

  Somehow, the IBM i platform and predecessor OS/400 platform have never been shown the same respect. Despite the fact that there are midrange and large enterprise customers who would very likely …

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• Kyndryl Inspects The Modernization Plans Of IBM i And Mainframe Shops

  November 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What paths are IBM i and mainframe users taking in terms of application modernization and digital transformation, and what sorts of results are those efforts producing? Those are good questions, and they are ones that Kyndryl, the former IBM Global Technology Services arm, provides some answers to in a new report.

  Kyndryl commissioned Coleman Parkes Research to survey 500 IBM i and mainframe shops from around the world about their plans for application modernization and transformation. The survey results form the basis for its appropriately named 2023 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey Report, which you can download here. …

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• Power Systems Software Gets Its Updates And Tweaks

  November 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a spring or fall IBM i Technology Refresh cycle if there were not some improvements to the auxiliary systems software that is an adjunct to the Power Systems stack. By which we mean the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC custom edition of the OpenStack cloud controller, the Hardware Management Console, the Cloud Management Console, and the system firmware for the Power iron itself.

  In announcement letter AD23-0498, you will see that all of these have been updated and you will also see how they are all intertwined with each other, cross-supporting their respective updates. …

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