• Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

  April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

  First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …

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• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

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• RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

  March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

  As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …

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• IBM Power On Track To Get Above $2 Billion A Year

  February 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s stock price is kissing $260 a share, and this is a level that, adjusted for stock splits, the company has not seen since before it ran up on the rocks in the early 1990s as its mainframe business and AS/400 business all shrank at the same time that RISC/Unix systems and X86 gear in the datacenter took off. What’s going on?

  Well, here is the deal: IBM has customers using its Power and z servers for mission-critical back office systems, and a lot of the customers using its IBM i, AIX, Linux, and z/OS platforms are going to be …

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• Dell And Big Blue Call It Quits On Storage Driver Support For IBM i

  December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM and sometime rival Dell Technologies are having a tiff over the licensing of technology that allows disk arrays descended from the venerable Symmetrix arrays created by EMC more than three decades ago to link to descendants of the AS/400 platform and OS/400 operating systems created three and a half decades ago.

  The fallout from what we presume is that a technology licensing fee agreement between Dell and IBM is similar, we think, to the one between IBM and the company that owns Information Builders. In October 2023, out of the blue, IBM announced that it was …

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• Power11 Takes Memory Bandwidth Up To, Well, Eleven

  December 2, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, we went over the roadmaps for the future Power11 processor from IBM and its follow-on, the Power Next chip that we presume will be called Power 12 because, you know, history. This week we want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the Power11 strategy and what this might mean for the systems that Big Blue will be building in the future.

  If IBM’s change in strategy with Power Systems since the Power9 generation has not been obvious to you, it perhaps bears pointing out. In the Power8 and Power9 generations, IBM was trying to …

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• IBM Nears The End of the Road for Server Reliability Improvements

  October 21, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Reliability has always been one of the hallmarks of IBM big iron, the midrange and mainframe systems hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses on around the world. These sturdy systems simply don’t go down very often, certainly less frequently than “industry-standard” (i.e. Intel-based) systems. In fact, the System z and Power systems are so reliable that, statistically speaking, there’s very little room for improvement.

  For data on uptime and reliability, we turn to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC), which is led by longtime IT industry analyst Laura DiDio. ITIC has been conducting an annual server and operating system …

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• Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron

  October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.

  Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …

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• 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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