Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud
September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.
There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …
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Withdrawal Symptoms: A Bunch Of IBM Services Tweaks, Storage Deleted
September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every product comes to the end of its life cycle, whether it is hardware or software or even services because it is troublesome to repair or troubleshoot the old stuff as it wears out (in the case of hardware) or suffers from bit rot (in the case of software) or brain drain (in the case of services). And so it is with a bunch of different things that affect some big Power Systems shops.
With a bunch of new Technical Account Manager (TAM) and ServicePac services offerings for the Power Systems line, which we wrote about back in August, …
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A Smorgasbord Of Power Systems Stuff
September 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is usually pretty quiet on the IT front in the wake of the American Labor Day holiday, especially with a lot of European countries also having bank holidays around that time and many schools just starting back up again. Here in 2022, it is no different, although IBM did uncharacteristically launch the full subscription entry Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers on September 6.
In any event, in the weeks surrounding the holiday, Big Blue did a bunch of stuff relating to the Power Systems platform and we want to tell you about it so you stay …
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The Scoop On The Full Subscription Power S1014 With IBM i
September 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even before the Power10 entry and midrange servers were announced by Big Blue on July 12, we did a thought experiment at the end of June about a rumored hardware-software-maintenance bundle on the single-socket Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers with a single monthly subscription price. And for fun, that thought experiment compared the monthly cost of a high-end iPhone smartphone with cell service and a data plan – somewhere between $75 and $80 – to what we expected such a full subscription-based, on premises Power S1014 would cost. We figured it would be around $50 per IBM …
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IBM’s Competitive Analysis For The Power10 Midrange Machine
August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For as long as there has been a Power architecture, way back in 1995 with the advent of the custom “Cobra Muskie” PowerPC AS chips, the rule of thumb for performance is that the Power core did twice the work of an Intel core designed for server workloads. This was true in 1993, when Intel jumped in the server racket with gusto, and it is true 31 years later as the entry and midrange Power10 machines in the same performance class as the top-end X86 iron from Intel and AMD are starting to ramp.
This performance gap on cores is …
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Two Weeks Of Webinars On IBM i Security
August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Security through obscurity was never a good OS/400 and IBM i security strategy, even though it was a commonly held belief by many in the base. Over the decades, the interconnected of systems has become more pronounced and security threats in the IT world have ramped up and – there are related, but not exclusively causal, relationships between these two phenomena. Suffice it to say, the need to be more proactive about system and application security has never been greater.
Well, unless you count next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. . . . …
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IBM’s Competitive Analysis For Power10 Entry Machines
August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Long gone are the days when IBM, and indeed most other server vendors, clamored to run TPC-C, SAP SD, and SPEC JVM transaction processing benchmark tests on their new machines to prove they had the performance and they had the bang for the buck to compete in the broader market.
To be fair, many of those tests had their flaws, allowing a certain amount of gaming of the benchmarks (as happened with the TPC-C and SPEC JVM tests) or not having official pricing attached to them (as happened with the SPEC JVM and SAP SD tests). Still, those benchmarks, as …
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Big Blue Taps FalconStor To Move Data To PowerVS Cloud And Protect It
August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When IBM i shops want to move some or all of their applications to the cloud, they have a lot of options. But there is still only one cloud that is designed and run by the same company that actually makes the Power Systems server and the IBM i operating system and database platform. And that, of course, is the Power Systems Virtual Server, colloquially known as PowerVS these days.
Over the longest of hauls, we expect that a fair number of IBM i shops will use the cloud in some capacity, and some will move their infrastructure entirely to …
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PowerVM, vHMC, HMC, And Cloud Management Console Get Their Tweaks
August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever the system hardware is updated, the virtualization and control plane software for that system also has to be tweaked, and we are finally getting around to covering some of improvements and changes that Big Blue has put into the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the HMC and vHMC management consoles, and the Cloud Management Console that were part of the July 12 Power10 entry and midrange system announcements.
In announcement letter 222-191, we get the hardware tweaks to the stacks mentioned above, and in announcement letter 122-053. There are not earth-shattering updates, mind you. (Why do we want …
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A Slew Of Add-On Services For Power10 Systems
August 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in February, we told you about a new set of services called Power Expert Care that offered enhanced services above and beyond Software Maintenance (SWMA) for the operating system and systems software stack and the hardware maintenance that comes with support contracts. In recent weeks, IBM has rolled out more services under the Power Expert Care umbrella.
In announcement letter 122-006, the based Power Expert Care services are extended to the Power10 entry servers – the Power S1014, the Power S1022s, the Power S1022, the Power L1022, the Power S1024, and the Power L1024 – and in announcement …
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