Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The AS/400: A 37-Year-Old Dog That Loves To Learn New Tricks
June 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the early years of the AS/400 platform, when we were new to the IT business and there were so many different datacenter computing platforms and even more operating systems, we didn’t think about the longevity of the AS/400 and its System/38 and System/36 predecessors. It was a new platform with a heritage, a system with both a past and a future out as far as we could see with our own youth and limited experience.
But over the years, in the early 2000s in particular, we started to keep track of the years the AS/400 was around and celebrated …
Read more -
Looks Like IBM Is Building A Linux-Like PASE For IBM i After All
June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is pleasing, indeed, whenever you think of something that would be useful for a particular platform and then you find out that the company is working on it. This is indeed what I thought of when we reviewed the IBM i – A Strategic Preview For 2025 And Beyond session hosted by IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will at the recent POWERUp 2025 conference in Anaheim, California. I was not able to attend the event, but my co-editor, Alex Woodie, was able to, and hence we were quite pleased to see that Big Blue is apparently working on …
Read more -
Now, IBM Is Jacking Up Hardware Maintenance Prices
June 16, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The first stirrings of hardware maintenance price increases that will affect IBM Power Systems shops have hit, starting in China for Power8 and Power9 machines and for Storage Expert Care support everywhere around the world except in Japan.
To be quite honest, when we read the hardware maintenance price increase in announcement letter AD25-1195, we did not at first see that it was restricted to the People’s Republic Of China and assumed that it was for the United States and quite possibly for the entire planet. But, alas and good for everyone outside of China, the 10 percent price …
Read more -
Big Blue Raises IBM i License Transfer Fees, Other Prices
June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The price increases that may or may not be happening to cover increasing costs at IBM continue apace. Some of the price increases we have seen over the past several months might be driven by increasing costs or the expectation of increasing costs, and others might be initiated to drive services and software revenues higher to push the profit level of the overall Power Systems business.
It is hard to say for sure.
But what we can say for certain is that last week, in announcement letter AD25-1142 dated June 2, Big Blue once again increased prices on various Power …
Read more -
IBM Readies LTO-10 Tape Drives And Libraries
June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As the capacities on flash and disk arrays continue to embiggen and the desire to keep data around is at a fever pitch as everyone is trying to figure out how to train generative AI models using all of their data, the need for tape backup for transactional and operational data has never been higher.
Which is why it is good timing for IBM to be rolling out its tape drives based on LTO-10 cartridges.
The IBM 3589 Ultrium LTO-10 cartridges, which are known as Models 554 and 654, have a native capacity of 30 TB, and with 2.5X data …
Read more -
Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage
June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.
In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …
Read more -
A Bunch Of IBM i-Power Systems Things To Be Aware Of
June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes you get a bunch of big announcements for the IBM i platform or the Power Systems machinery it runs on, and sometimes there are some smaller things that are interesting to a smaller group of people but no less important in their worlds than the big stuff.
So it is this week.
In announcement letter AD25-0887 dated May 27, which is where we also saw the withdrawal of marketing of RDX disk backup units and which we reported on elsewhere in this issue, we also see that the 1 TB and 2 TB removable disk cartridges are being removed. …
Read more -
IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.
This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …
Read more -
Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”
This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …
Read more -
Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.
The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …
Read more