Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services
July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.
The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM …
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Big Blue’s New “WebSpheres” To Surf The Container And AI Waves
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Without question, there is a lot of money that can be made on AI training and inference, as is aptly shown by the financial results of Nvidia. That company, which is the darling of Wall Street these days, has gone from datacenter wannabe to datacenter giant in the course of a decade and a half. It has been fascinating to watch, but it is as much the result of lucky timing as hard work, as Jensen Huang, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, admitted from the beginning.
Nvidia has been working on parallel computing architectures for accelerating HPC workloads …
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Power Systems Down A Bit, But Holding Steady In Q2
July 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Considering that we are over a year into the Power10 entry and midrange server upgrade cycle, and almost two years into the Power10 high-end cycle, the fact that the Power Systems server business is only down a few points in the second quarter is, well, normal. As in the old normal where things have a natural ebb and flow and the business is not just in a kind of 45 degree decline like we saw a decade ago.
This is what happens when Big Blue sticks to its enterprise computing knitting and is not distracted by the money-losing proposition of …
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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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