Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM
May 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Earlier this week, we told you about a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when running on Power9 and Power10 systems. IBM found the vulnerability itself and immediately set about to patch the vulnerability, which it revealed on May 17 along with patches to firmware in systems that are managed by the Hardware Management Console, or HMC.
What was not necessarily apparent was that there are plenty of Power Systems customers who do not have HMCs managing their systems and the logical partitions upon them, and this is particularly true of the IBM i installed base, which …
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Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM Hypervisor
May 22, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) put out a notice on Wednesday, May 17, to inform the Power Systems installed base that there is a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor. You can see the PSIRT notice at this link and the Security Bulletin: This Power System firmware update is being released to address CVE 2023-30438 at this link. This has a CVSS base score of 9.3, which means it is critical.
We very rarely see any security vulnerabilities being reported for the PowerVM hypervisor or for the IBM i operating system itself, for that matter, …
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The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin
May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.
The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …
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Cloud Infrastructure Spending Growing, But More Slowly
May 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you look at financials, you need to think quarterly year on year to get a sense of growth over the annual and often seasonal business cycles that drive the economy. And then you also need to think sequentially so you can see when something that is growing on its own momentum, as cloud computing has been doing for the better part of a decade, shifts to a more seasonal flow.
With the latest market figures released from hyperscaler and cloud watcher Synergy Research, whose chief analyst and managing director is John Dinsdale, dices and slices the public view of …
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Technology Always Replaces People While Augmenting Others
May 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there is one rule of technology, it is that technology always replaces some people while augmenting others. And like religion and politics or how much money you make, it was not discussed in polite company. With the advent of machine learning-driven AI and the modern and often impolite world it was born into, this may not be the case anymore. People are talking. IBM among them.
When IBM launched the System/360 mainframe in April 1964, it was a transformative thing for what was yet to become the computer industry. Early on, with the advent of data store and database …
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OpenShift Can Be The New PASE For IBM i Shops
May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you can’t beat ‘em, encapsulate ‘em. That is not the official rallying cry of the IBM i platform, but that certainly has been the philosophy of the Private Address Space Environment that was cooked up by the techies in IBM’s labs in Austin, Texas, home of the RS/6000, and Rochester, Minnesota, home of the AS/400. The marketing people eventually changed its name to the Portable Application Solution Environment, which we know as PASE either way. We have a great PASE, but it is time to make a new one that is more relevant for the time. We are …
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IBM Updates Performance Guide For Latest Power10 Iron
May 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
No matter what system you are talking about, no matter what kind of applications you are running, there are always ways to squeeze more performance out of the system. The IBM i platform running atop Power10 and earlier processors is no exception, and to that end, for several years now Big Blue has provided some guidance on pushing performance with each new CPU family and as new features are added to the OS/400 and IBM i software stack.
The latest such update, according to Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i platform, has just been published, and you can …
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An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023
April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.
And work, of course. …
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Storage Helps Power Systems Grow In The First Quarter
April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is a peculiar thing: It is almost like there are two different Power Systems customer sets. Those that spend big in the second quarter and fourth quarter of every year and those that spend less big in the first and third quarters of every year.
While we understand the normal Q4 bump that happens because there are decades of traditions, founded on good budgetary and capacity planning practices, we are a bit perplexed why when it comes to the Power Systems market at least, Q2 is almost as good revenue-wise as the prior Q4. We admit fully that this …
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A Common Market, A Common Currency, A Common Theme
April 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It seems like forever since I went to a COMMON midrange user group, and yes, I know it is called PowerUp 2023 and I know everyone shouts POWER in their POWERUp but I don’t. When someone SHOUTS IN THIS NEWSLETTER, I want you to see it. Marketeers don’t get to change the way language and typography works just because they have a love of ransom notes.
I am very much looking forward to going to PowerUp, even though I am not all that excited to drive from Boone at 3:30 a.m. in the morning to catch a 6:30 a.m. boarding …
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