Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Year From Now, Most Power9 Systems Bite The Rust
January 27, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For whatever reason, there are lots of IBM announcements that are not released through IBM’s normal announcement channels. While participating in the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, I came to find out that an announcement for the sunsetting of technical support for selected Power9 systems was actually released last year. We had been expecting it around now, and it doesn’t take effect until a year from now, so whew! No harm, no foul.
As it turns out, this announcement was made back on September 12, 2024, through a PDF posting on Big Blue’s Systems support portal. You have to …
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Talking Power Systems And IBM i With Bargav Balakrishnan
January 20, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how the Power Systems division had a new vice president of product management – to be specific, Bargav Balakrishnan, who has spent decades in various technical and management roles within Big Blue. Balakrishnan takes over from Steve Sibley, who has been steering Power Systems hardware development since July 2007 and who was the longest serving executive in that role since the launch of the AS/400 back in 1988.
This week, we had a chat with Balakrishnan about the Power Systems business and the IBM i platform, and …
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Power Systems Has A New Vice President Of Product Management
January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Throughout the history of IBM systems, there are executives who steer the development of hardware and those that steer the development of microcode, operating systems, and other software. Still others at Big Blue manage the processor roadmaps as well as the evolution of the systems that make use of them, including all of the peripherals that go into turning central processing units into systems.
We have always liked these software and hardware people, as well as the multitudes who work with them and for them. They have given us valuable time and insight over the many decades that The Four …
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IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything
January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.
Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …
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IBM Boosts Prices Even Further Outside The United States
December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back on November 4, we told you about a price increase that IBM instituted across its Power Systems, storage hardware and storage software, and Software Maintenance services. These price increases were supposedly announced on September 3, but IBM’s system did not notify us of them until October 29, and we told you about it in the subsequent edition of this newsletter. The delay didn’t matter much because the price changes are not effective until January 1, 2025.
And now, the rest of the world is going to get an extra taste of inflation, as you will see in announcement letter …
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Dell And Big Blue Call It Quits On Storage Driver Support For IBM i
December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It looks like IBM and sometime rival Dell Technologies are having a tiff over the licensing of technology that allows disk arrays descended from the venerable Symmetrix arrays created by EMC more than three decades ago to link to descendants of the AS/400 platform and OS/400 operating systems created three and a half decades ago.
The fallout from what we presume is that a technology licensing fee agreement between Dell and IBM is similar, we think, to the one between IBM and the company that owns Information Builders. In October 2023, out of the blue, IBM announced that it was …
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Happy Holidays From All Of Us To All Of You
December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every year has its own twists, turns, and challenges for any company and for the people who comprise that company. Over the years, we have had our share of adversity. 2019 and 2020 and 2024 were tough years for us, and we are all frankly happy to have pushed through the to end of this one so we can hit reset and attack 2025 with the usual vim and vigor.
No matter where you are, everybody gets their turn with adversity, and if hard times have come to you, we just want to know that we feel you. Do your …
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Power11 Takes Memory Bandwidth Up To, Well, Eleven
December 2, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, we went over the roadmaps for the future Power11 processor from IBM and its follow-on, the Power Next chip that we presume will be called Power 12 because, you know, history. This week we want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the Power11 strategy and what this might mean for the systems that Big Blue will be building in the future.
If IBM’s change in strategy with Power Systems since the Power9 generation has not been obvious to you, it perhaps bears pointing out. In the Power8 and Power9 generations, IBM was trying to …
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IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors
November 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we were pretty sure that IBM was working on some sort of accelerated system for GenAI applications and a week later we remembered that the obvious pairing was a Power System host with scads of IBM’s own “Spyre” AI accelerators running …
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Power Systems Distributor Ingram Micro Goes Public (Again)
November 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We admit it. It has been a long, long time since we paid much attention to the master distributors that IBM and other IT equipment makers use as a channel between themselves and their systems customers. We used to follow Arrow Electronics and Avnet like a hawk. But we got sidetracked and stopped thinking about them, in part because the late and great Dan Burger used to be our go-to guy for keeping in touch with the Power Systems channel distributors.
The recent initial public offering of Ingram Micro, which is really the second time the company has gone public …
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