Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron
October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.
Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …
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What Exactly Is IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5?
October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When I moved to New York City back in 1989, I didn’t have to worry much about directions. Like most new New Yorkers, I built a small town of my own out of the locations of my apartment, my work, a few restaurants, and a few bars, and the rest of the vast island of Manhattan was a big, living movie set.
It wasn’t until I had my first child a decade later that I was in a car and understood how maddeningly bad signage was in the Big Apple, and indeed in many other places. And it was so …
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IBM Is Running Out Of DDR4 Memory Faster Than It Thought
September 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in August, we told you about how Big Blue was shifting away from the DDR4 main memory chips and towards DDR5 main memory chips for Power10 systems, which were designed expressly to support both types of memory.
This is just like Power8 servers were designed to support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, with the latter coming halfway through the Power8 product cycle. The Power9 machines used DDR4 memory solely, and the Power10 is getting support for DDR5 a little late in its cycle, given that we expect Power11 servers next year. Presumably the Power11 servers will just support DDR5 …
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How Ya Doing Out There?
September 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We keep track of a lot of things on your behalf here at IT Jungle.
We cover all of the major product announcements from Big Blue, giving you the feeds and speeds, competitive analysis, pricing and performance analysis, and other issues that you need to consider as you keep your Power Systems platforms current and supporting your business.
We watch all of the changes in the IBM i stack, Technology Refresh and PTF updates, and we do the best that we can – and we think better than anyone else in the market – to keep track of what the …
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Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.
The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …
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CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted
September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.
Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Numbers 34 And 35
September 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is not only a relatively quiet time still for PTFs, but it is also Ketchup Week since The Four Hundred has been on a light publishing schedule during the past several weeks of the summer.
We do have one security vulnerability and a few patches to deal with. First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration is vulnerable to multiple vulnerabilities, which you can find out more about here. The affected products include IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration 1.0 through 1.4.8 and 2.0 through 2.0.2.
Here is the rundown of PTF Groups …
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IBM Shutters Systems Research And Development Labs In China
September 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What a change four decades makes, and what a bigger change even a decade has made, when it comes to the relationship between the United States and China.
Four decades ago, when Big Blue started to do business for real in China, the only reason to believe that the Middle Kingdom might one day rival the United States economically and militarily was the vastness of its population, the breadth and depth of its natural resources, and the patience and tenacity of its command economy. China was the anchor economy of the so-called BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – …
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How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.
But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …
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Getting A Handle On What GenAI Might Cost
August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Because of my other day job at The Next Platform, I can give you a pretty good idea about what it costs to train an AI model or run inference against it once it is trained. But I have seen very little data that tries to give any of a sense of what it costs to add generative AI functionality to applications.
But interestingly, Gartner analysts embedded some such data in a report about how it expected many GenAI projects to be abandoned by the end of 2025 after their proofs of concept fail. That so many PoCs will …
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