Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Downshifting Of IT Spending Growth Continues Apace
April 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The central banks of the world don’t have a lot of levers to pull to change the behavior of the national and regional economies that they control. But when they raise interest rates, there is a predictable triple-whammy impact on the economy. Companies start cutting costs, including people, and those who don’t lose their jobs curtail spending just in case they might or in case the economy will slow, and the cost of borrowing money goes up and that dampens demand for big ticket items like houses and cars, which feeds back into the economy.
And thus, it is no …
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Greymine Launches PerfScan To Monitor And Manage IBM i Performance
April 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not every day that the IBM i market gets a brand new vendor with a shiny new product, and so today we are celebrating the official launch of PerfScan, a new performance management and monitoring tool aimed at the IBM i market that will expand out to cover all of the platforms running on IBM’s Power Systems – that means AIX and Linux – as well as running on adjacent systems in the datacenter – that means Linux and Windows Server and any weird legacy stuff that customers might ask for.
PerfScan is the first product – and …
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Direct Attached Storage Gets Massive NVM-Express Expansion
April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The storage area network – a giant wonking storage server with lots of lossless Fibre Channel switching between servers that share access to virtual storage partitions – has been around for several decades now. And despite all of the talk of its ubiquity, and usefulness in driving up storage utilization across a bunch of servers and therefore helping drive down the cost of that storage while also enhancing its manageability and shareability, for many IBM i shops, using directly attached storage is what they want to do.
There are reasons for this, of course. In many cases, the IBM i …
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Tweaks To The Power Software Stack, And Red Hat Gets Easier
April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever there are Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system, its database, and the related systems and development tools for IBM i, you can bet Elon Musk’s last dollar that there will also be nips and tucks, and sometimes more significant changes, to the adjunct software that runs on Power Systems iron. Such as the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the PowerSC security tools, and other things.
And indeed, as part of the April 11 announcements, IBM has tweaked this Power Systems stuff. This is not one of the big ones, as …
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Entry Servers: IBM i Versus Windows Server, Redux
April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
No comparison between similar but different things is ever perfect. It is the nature of language, constructed of similes and metaphors, as well as science, which speaks in generalities but craves ever-finer precision. It is no different when trying to compare different system platforms, which we do quite often around here at The Four Hundred and have for three and a half decades.
The comparison between the Power S1022s running IBM i and a Dell PowerEdge R7515 running Windows Server and SQL Server, which we did last week, needed some refinement, I learned from an intrepid reader who reminded …
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Technology Refreshes, And Maybe Some Hardware Tweaks, Coming This Week
April 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have heard through the rumor mill for weeks that we should expect Technology Refreshes for the current releases of IBM i sometime this week, and Tuesday being a traditional announcement day for Big Blue, it is reasonable to assume that this will happen on April 11. With history as a guide, it is reasonable to also assume that there will be some kind of tweaks to the Power Systems hardware and to parts of the software stack that IBM has on this machines, including but not limited to, IBM i.
This being the belly of the Power10 hardware cycle, …
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Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers
April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.
And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …
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Machine Customers Are Not Customers Who Buy Machines
April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The world is getting truly strange. I can appreciate that in a world where hundreds of millions to billions of users all make use of humongous applications that have hundreds to thousands of calls to microservices application snippets and service. But somehow, I just cannot make the leap to something that Gartner is now calling “machine customers.”
The term came to light, for us at least, two weeks ago when two market researchers at Gartner – Don Scheibenreif, distinguished vice president analyst and leader of Gartner’s research on customer experience, and Mark Raskino, also a distinguished vice president analyst as …
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Blazing The Trail For VTL In The Cloud
March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Making the decision to move IBM i applications to the cloud is a relatively easy endeavor. But covering all of the bases, particularly when it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, takes some thought because even though the cloud is an ideal place to do HA and DR, not every cloud does it right. And doing it right often means using a mix of technologies and service providers.
IT managers are thinking of moving their IBM i workloads to the cloud for good reasons. They do the math, they weigh the risks and rewards. They take into account all …
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The Big Spending On IT Security Is Only Going To Get Bigger
March 29, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes, numbers seem so big that they are almost meaningless. Depending on how you cut it, there is more than $3.4 trillion to more than $4.5 trillion in global spending on IT hardware, software, and services – not counting the payrolls for the for all of the combine IT departments of the corporate world plus all of those programmers and site recovery engineers who work at the hyperscalers and cloud builders. These are very big numbers indeed, even without those tens of millions of people on the payroll, who by our very rough estimation might account for somewhere around the …
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