Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080
November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.
These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …
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A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades
November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.
The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …
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Bang For The Buck For Big Power Iron Over Time
November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the shipments of the “Denali” Power E1080 server ramping at IBM, we have also been ramping up our analysis of the machine to help the relative few of you IBM i shops – on the order of hundreds – who will need to upgrade your Power 795, Power 770, Power 780, Power E870, Power E880, and even possibly your Power E980 machines to the new top-end Power Systems NUMA server.
But make no mistake. What IBM is doing with the Power E1080 in terms of performance and price/performance bears relevance, indirectly and somewhat more directly, on each and every …
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Talking Certified Pre-Owned Equipment With Arrow
November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Arrow Electronics is one of the three master distributors of IBM Power Systems machines and related storage in North America, and it also has decades of experience selling secondhand equipment as well as new gear through its partnership with IBM.
Recently, Arrow has partnered with IBM so its resellers can offer their Power Systems and Storage customers certified pre-owned equipment that has been put through the remanufacturing processes of IBM’s Global Asset Recovery Services business. This is now the sole means by which Arrow is helping its resellers bring CPO machinery to Power Systems and Storage shops that, for many …
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IBM Adds ServicePacs For Power Machine Setup, Other Tweaks
November 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The legacy IBM Company from decades gone by charged a hell of a lot for its systems and offered a slew of handholding to make it all worthwhile. Somewhere along the way, service became a profit center and a revenue driver instead of an attitude about customer service, and you can’t entirely blame IBM because time is money and people don’t obey Moore’s Law economics.
The ServicePac offerings that Big Blue has put together in recent years, which cover just about every aspect of its hardware and software stack, seem like a mix of old and new. Yes, the services …
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Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System
November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.
Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …
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Gartner Revises IT Spending Forecasts Upward For 2021 And 2022
November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With a market as large as the information technology racket, small changes rack up to tens of billions of dollars up or down in global spending. Any increase is generally seen as good news because so many of the individual IT budgets are gauged against the global average. So, in a sense, it just got a little bit easier for you to argue that your own IT department should be spending more dough on IT because the prognosticators at Gartner have just raised their forecast for IT spending in 2022.
It’s not much of an increase, mind you. So don’t …
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Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10
November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.
With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …
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A Proper Accounting Of The Power Business
October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue might be preparing for the spinout of its Kyndryl managed services company, now slated for early November, and its new financial presentations, which we reviewed two weeks ago, but that task is not yet done and until it is we are still getting the same financial view of IBM in the third quarter of 2021 ended in June. It was not a particularly memorable quarter when it came to IBM Systems group.
But it is looking like IBM is going to be able to pad a better 2022, with Kyndryl taking on a huge amount of software …
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Talking Power Systems Deals With The Boss
October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What a relief when you speak the same language with someone in the business. In any business. But particularly with someone in the AS/400 and IBM i business, who has been at it about the same time as you, has seen the same stuff as you, has the same frames of reference as you, and who knows what the hell you are talking about even if they don’t agree with you all the time.
That’s how it is with the boss at UCG Technologies, that being president and founder Jim Kandrac, who is proud of his city of Cleveland and …
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