Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM i And The 2039 Two-Digit Date Problem
June 6, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As most of you remember, the shift to four-digit dates at the turn of the millennium was a big pain in the ass, but the world did not come to an end because people got said asses in gear and rectified the problem. (Almost pun int-ended.)
Anyway, as it turns out, there is another date problem that happens in 2039 in a lot of operating systems, and this one also affects the IBM i platform. IBM had certain system values that had a two-digit date, and they natural could only span 100 years – all you can do …
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How Committed Is Big Blue To The IBM Cloud?
May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Before you get all nervous, I did not ask how committed is Big Blue to the Power Virtual Server. So don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. But we are beginning to wonder just how committed IBM is to the idea of operating a globe-spanning X86 server cloud that competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Cloud.
What got us to thinking about this was an announcement by IBM that it has signed a “strategic collaborative agreement” with AWS, which is just facing the facts that AWS is the …
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Inflation Pumps Up Global IT Spending, Supply Chain Deflates It
May 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is not a newsflash, but it is a bit crazy out there on Earth right now. Predicting what spending will be in any industry and for any durable good or service is extremely difficult. But, prediction is what humans do, and the prognosticators at Gartner have done their best to try to figure out where IT spending is going to go in the next two years.
As far as they can tell, global IT spending actually rose by a remarkable 9.5 percent to $4.26 trillion in 2021, with spending being particularly brisk for software and devices (which includes PCs, …
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Simplified IBM i Stack Bundling Ahead Of Subscription Pricing
May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a bunch of things that were announced on May 3 by IBM ahead of the POWERUp 2022 conference coming later this month and well ahead of the launch of entry and midrange Power10 machines in July. One of them was IBM i 7.5, and the other was the Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, otherwise known as Merlin, for transforming old RPG code into free format RPG code.
The third thing, which IBM has been talking around for a while and is getting more serious about is offering IBM i hardware and software on a subscription basis rather than …
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More Price Hikes From IBM, Now For High End Storage
May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The price increases at IBM just keep coming as the company passes on higher component costs, and very likely higher manufacturing and support costs, that it is experiencing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic on to customers. Now we are seeing higher prices on high-end external storage.
We have covered a number of IBM’s recent price hikes in the past several weeks, which you can see in the Related Stories section at the end of this report. But to characterize them briefly to put the new price increases into context, we have seen inflation in the prices for certain Power9 and …
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Big Blue Readies Power10 And IBM i 7.5 Training for Partners
May 16, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever there is a big product announcement from IBM, there are months and months of field work that gets done ahead of that super Tuesday when the customers are notified of the new systems and systems software that has been in development for years and that is finally available. Well, usually available within a few weeks if not at announcement.
That announcement education and training machine has been in motion for months, and the next and penultimate phase of this process is soon going to be underway, which means that Big Blue is getting ready to launch Power10 systems into …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Chilli IT
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are many strengths in the IBM i platform besides its hardware and software architecture or the sophistication and ease of programming embodied in its development tools. The diversity of its partner ecosystem is another strength.
As we pointed out last March with the launch of our ongoing In The IBM i Trenches series, globally there are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, as well as thousands of suppliers of third party maintenance, of technical support, of programming and system management services, and now of hosting and cloud computing. We want to get …
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Power Private Cloud Gets More Cloudy With Pricing Tweaks
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As promised two years ago, Big Blue has been gradually and steadily transforming from a business model where it sells machines and perpetual software licenses and support for the both of them to a model where it sells capacity based on usage like a big cloud – like its own IBM Cloud – does.
As part of the May 3 announcements, IBM has made a few changes to its Power Private Cloud Solution – the word “solution” has become basically useless in the context of IT, just like “offering” has, and I tell writers that I work with that if …
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Power9 Servers Get Updated Flash Drives
May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM may be on the verge of launching its entry and midrange Power10 servers in July, as we reported last week, but that doesn’t mean it will not continue to sell Power9-based machines for now and out past the general availability of the Power10-based systems.
To that end, in announcement letter 122-042, IBM is adding new enterprise-grade flash drives in the U.2 form factor that is roughly analogous to a 2.5-inch disk drive. These new drives, which come from an unnamed source, support the NVM-Express protocol that speeds up flash drives (because they stop talking the SCSI disk …
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Entry And Midrange Power10 Machines Coming In July
May 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If an IT supplier never gives a precise date for the launch of a product – and there are plenty of them that do not – then they can never be officially accused of shipping something late when the delivery date slips. But in the era of Coronavirus, all kinds of things are shipping later than expected and one of them is the entry Power Systems servers based on the Power10 processor. The other one is the midrange Power Systems machine based on the Power10.
In a pre-briefing with Steve Sibley, vice president and global offering manager for Power Systems, …
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