Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Last Power8 Machine Gets End Of Service Notice
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in November 2022, amongst a slew of other machinery, customers using the vast majority of the Power Systems servers based on the Power8 processor were warned that IBM was cutting off its maintenance and support for these machines effective between March and October 2024. That may sound like a long time from now, but it really isn’t when you have to hustle a system upgrade, complete with application software, through the budgetary and testing hoops.
We wrote about those Power8 system withdrawals here, and in case you need to dig out the notice again, the new IBM Documentation system …
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A Slew Of Power Systems Features Are Being Sunsetted
July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue has long since stopped selling Power8 machinery and has been winding down sales of Power9-based systems as its Power10 machines, which made their debut in late 2021 and early 2022, are ascending. So, it is natural that features for Power8 and Power9 machinery are being withdrawn. But even some features with the newer Power10 machines are also being withdrawn, in some cases because supplies are running out and in other cases because better features have been introduced.
You have to keep up with these things so you can get what you need before IBM stops selling whatever that …
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The Majority Of Large Enterprises To Boost IT Staff This Year
July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The sample is small, the data is a little bit musty, but the news is good.
Back in October and November last year, the market researchers at Gartner did a survey of chief information officers at large enterprises and 501 people responded from all over the world; 182 of them were from North America, Europe/Africa/Middle East, and Asia/Pacific, which means by definition that Central America and South America were over-represented a bit in the survey. So take these results with a grain of salt, and maybe some pepper.
By Gartner’s definition, a large enterprise is one with $1 billion or …
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Spending On Legacy Systems Stalls In Q1, 2023 Forecast Looks Weak
July 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Neither Gartner nor IDC put out their quarterly server and storage reports for the public anymore, but IDC does still release a converged dataset that adds server and storage spending together and carves it up based on if it is spend on the clouds or for traditional – what we would call legacy – systems. The latest results are out for the first quarter of 2023, and there is what looks like a temporary stall in legacy system spending and it looks like it is going to get worse here in 2023 but return to growth in the coming years. …
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Big Blue Offers Cheaper Standard Shipping For IBM i Systems
July 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Since the dawn of time, one kind of shipping and handling was bundled into the price of AS/400 and successor systems. But that has just changed. Now, Big Blue is offering two tiers of shipping and handling for machinery it ships to customers, including Power Systems servers and current in its IBM Storage lineup of tape, disk, and flash products – and it is giving the customers a choice on how they want things shipped and therefore what price they will pay.
This change was inevitable, and frankly, given the high costs of shipping anything these days, it is amazing …
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Integrate 2023, The Lyrics
June 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When I was at the POWERUp conference in Denver back in late April along with my co-editor, Alex Woodie, we were sitting in the opening keynote address when Alison Butterill, IBM i offering manager, and Steve Will, IBM i chief architect, were on stage talking about the AS/400 launch and how the platform has evolved over time, there was a point in the presentation when a slide went up that listed some of the key features of the platform. I remember seeing “Innovate” and “Integrate” at the top of the list, and that sent my brain down an internal monologue …
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Talking System Architecture With The Frank Soltis
June 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a very funny way, the System/38 and its AS/400 and following progeny are the product of coincidence and brilliance. In 1962, had Frank Soltis taken that summer job at an aerospace company that he wanted to work for in Southern California, first of all, he might have ended up with a tan, and second of all, whatever followed the System/34 almost certainly would not have had single level storage, much less the architecture that we still know today, in modified form, as the IBM i platform.
Lucky for us that Frank’s father, who ran a parts distribution operation for …
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Happy Coral Anniversary, System/36 And System/38!
June 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The AS/400 is the product of the marriage of the System/36 and the System/38 that had its first child delivered on June 21, 1988. So, to one way of thinking about it, the AS/400 is not just celebrating its 35th birthday this week, but the System/36 and the System/38 are celebrating their Coral Anniversary. The rules of etiquette say that we have to send IBM Rochester something carved in jade to celebrate.
The AS/400, which lives on as the IBM i platform running on Power10 hardware, is neither stuck on a coral reef nor jaded, but just going …
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Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance
June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.
The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …
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How Does Your Infrastructure Spending Stack Up To The World?
June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As IT analysts, as well as IT journalists, we believe that the economic questions of how many widgets consumed, how much revenue and profit do they generate, and how fast are markets changing and evolving as new widgets come and old widgets go are just as important as the feeds, speeds, slots, and watts of any particular widgetry.
That is why we have always looked at both sets of IT data over time, to get a 3-D feel for the market and its flows of hardware, software, and services across workloads. It is very rare when one of the market …
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