Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Recent IBM i Redbook Roundup
January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Say what you will about IBM, but it puts out a lot of technical information compared to its peers in the systems business, and always has. The techies at Big Blue and its many business partners expend a great deal of effort to put good technical information about Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform out there to help people better understand, run, and manage their applications and systems.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we perused the IBM Redbook library on your behalf and now present to you a roundup of the most …
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IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database
January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.
The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …
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The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.
There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …
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The Great Resignation Intersects Application Modernization And Digital Transformation
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Depending on how you want to look at it, today is March 680, 2020, or January 10, 2022. It is too early to tell if it is actually a new year or just the penultimate one stretched out unnaturally by biological circumstance. We remain hopeful that 2022 will represent something of a return to normal, but we also know that we can never return to the way things were in 2019. Too many people have had too much time to think about their careers, and a very large number of people are considering job changes or have already jumped ship …
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IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips
January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue might have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip fabrication operation to GlobalFoundries many years ago, but that does not mean that the company does not still do a reasonably large amount of fundamental research into chip maker techniques and tricks. Transistor, chip, and packaging research and development is a big portion of the patent portfolio at IBM and continues to be so because Big Blue still has some of the smartest chipheads on the planet working for it because IBM wants to ensure there is a roadmap for future Power and System z processors and because it can …
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How Much Software Budget Does AI Drive?
December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Fake brain-like software based on neural networks is all the rage now, and probably will be for the next decade or so, but you may be surprised at how much money is being spent on software that has some sort of AI embedded in it and also to learn what a small piece of the overall IT market that this AI software represents at this point in IT history.
The market researchers and prognosticators at Gartner recently tried to case the AI software market, and looked at how much money the top five use cases for software that have AI …
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2021 Almost Done, Happy Holidays From IT Jungle To Everyone
December 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As far as I can tell, it is really March 654th, 2020 as we bring the 31st volume of The Four Hundred to a close here in what people are still calling 2021 for nostalgia’s sake. We are grateful to have served another year for the IBM i community, and we look forward not only to a well-deserved rest but also to building up some reserves of energy during the holiday season to take on 2022.
By all indications, it looks like 2022 will be an interesting year for the Power Systems platform, with entry and midrange …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: IBM Champion Ash Giddings
December 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe, but not everybody who has worked on an AS/400, iSeries, System i, or IBM i platform is a programmer. Even if they care a great deal about programs and how they run on the boxes. Ash Giddings, who is an IBM Champion in 2021 and a newly appointed product manager at high availability software provider Maxava, is one such chap, and we got an opportunity to have a chat with Giddings about what is going on with performance management, systems management, disaster recovery, and high availability out there in the IBM i base.
Like …
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Supply Chain Problems Cause Power Systems SAS Controller Shortage
December 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The coronavirus pandemic has been doing strange things to the world’s supply chains for nearly two years now, and all things considered, the Power Systems platform has been largely spared from any serious issues. Until now.
We have just caught wind of a notice that Tech Data has sent out to all of its Power Systems business partners that IBM has plenty of SAS disk drives and SAS flash drives, but that “demand currently exceeds supply availability” for SAS controllers and SAS backplanes. The shortage just hit hard in the past week or so, and now orders that have SAS …
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IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices
December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.
In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …
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