Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates
October 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.
In announcement letter 222-279, we find the usual agglomeration of updates to the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the virtual Hardware Management Console, and the Cloud Management Console.
With PowerVM, IBM wanted to …
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It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry
October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.
And so, back in 2014, IBM …
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Integrated Does Not Have To Mean Included And Invoiced
October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In this era of “pay for what you eat” cloud computing – maybe they should have called it “buffet computing” after all because there sure as hell is nothing cloudy about the bill when it comes – it seems odd that customers can’t pick a la carte the things they want and they don’t want in a system that nonetheless has all of its myriad components and services integrated.
Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated, with one throat to choke (for the most part) when things go wrong. We are strong believers in …
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Like Tupperware, Think About Storage When You Move To The Cloud
October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It would be hard to find a company that knows more about storage than Tupperware Brands, which has a globe-spanning $1.6 billion business that designs and manufactures myriad containers to store food and beverages and has famously sold them through Tupperware parties for the past 75 years.
For the past several decades, Tupperware operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have run their manufacturing and back-office operations on IBM’s AS/400 (now known as Power) systems and their progeny, just like countless other manufacturers and distributors have done around the world. The choice of the AS/400 was driven by a …
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The IBM i Marketplace Survey Is Open For You
October 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
How many times a day do people tell you what you know matters? Well, it does, and I am telling you. But that knowledge of your IBM i environment is not doing anyone any good, stuck inside of your noggin. To get a realistic sense of what is actually going on out there in IBM i Land, we need you to pipe up.
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and will be for a few more weeks. But we don’t want you to wait until the last minute to participate. Please …
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IBM i 7.3 Loses Standard Support On September 30, 2023
October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue just got the IBM i 7.5 operating system and system software stack out the door for Power9 and Power10 machines back in May, and from that moment the clock was ticking on regular support for the IBM i release that came out in April 2016 and that represents the second most popular release on primary machines based on data from the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey.
Most operating system makers – there are not that many of them left in the datacenter these days – offer standard support for their releases and versions for seven years …
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We Need Some Insight From You
October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What you are doing – and what you are not doing – with you IBM i platform is important to us. And that is why we are asking you to take the 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall.
This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base.
The data that this survey gathers is invaluable, and long-time readers of The Four Hundred know full …
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Take A Minute, And Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
September 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, you. Yeah, we mean you. You have something we need.
It’s information. You know, the currency of the modern era. Without it, we can’t figure out where you are and where you are going, and that means we can’t figure out where the IBM i base is and where it might be going. The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey sponsored by HelpSystems every fall is open, and we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.
This survey, which was conceived of by …
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Without Further Ado: Power10 Entry Server Pricing
September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been through the new Power10 entry servers from just about every angle imaginable, which has been our great pleasure. And now, we come to the moment we have all been waiting for: What is the bang for the buck of a Power10 machine? As is usually the case when you ask any question, the answer is: It depends.
To try to figure this out, we put together pricing information for all of the different variations of processors for the Power8, Power9, and now Power10 entry servers with one of two processors. And when we say all of …
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It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall is open, and if we hope to get some insight into what is going on in the base and report back on it in January 2023, we need you to take a few moments right now to take the survey and tell us about your IBM i shop.
This survey, which was conceived of by the late Dan Burger of IT Jungle and Tom Huntington of HelpSystems, was started nine years ago because we were all frustrated by the lack of insight about the IBM i base. …
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