Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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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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