Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.
For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?
A lot more than you probably think, as it …
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Systems Software Stack Gets A Refresh With Power10
September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When there is new server hardware, the systems software stack needs to be tweaked to support it and to take better advantage of it. And that is also a perfect time to add new features to the systems software that can be supported on older iron. (But not too old or customers will never move forward. . . . )
And so it is with the various core systems software – PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerSC, and the HMC – that runs atop Power Systems machinery and either alongside of or underneath the IBM i operating system and the IBM i Technology …
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Some Power9 Tweaks And Withdrawals
September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a very rare announcement cycle where IBM announces a new machine and does not offer some tweaks to or withdrawals for older machinery. And, as we always expect, Big Blue did both as part of the September 8 IBM i and Power E1080 server announcements.
In announcement letter 121-052, IBM made some tweaks to the NVM-Express U.2 form factor solid state flash drives for the Power9 entry, midrange, and high end servers. The new U.2 flash drives have an 800 GB capacity and are aimed at AIX and Linux partitions that have 4K block sizes. These drives …
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The Cacophony Of Many Different Server Markets
September 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Considering how skittery the global economy is, how wonky the world’s supply chains are, and how capricious spending by the big public clouds and the hyperscalers can be (and how much the top eight server buyers in the world make up of the overall market), the fact that the server market only had a 2.5 percent decline in the second quarter is not a surprise.
It’s just the normal noise in the data, and perhaps, if IDC is right, a slight shift away from using two-socket servers with a modest number of cores to single-socket servers with a larger number …
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IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First
September 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After a long, long wait – it has been nearly four years since the first Power9 machine was launched in the “Witherspoon” Power AC922 supercomputing node back in December 2017 based on the 24-core “Nimbus” Power9 processor and just over three years since the high-end “Fleetwood” Power E980 system debuted with the 12-core “Cumulus” Power9 variant – the first machines out of IBM based on the Power10 processor are being unveiled.
The expected three-year cadence between processor generations set by IBM a long time ago has worked out almost precisely for high-end Power Systems shops, with today’s launch of the …
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Forecast: Systems Spending Steady, Up For Services And Software
August 30, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The individual IT budgets at the companies we work at exist in relation to – and often in stark contrast to – the overall market and to companies that are the same size as ours or in the same industry we play in. In this sense, IT spending forecasts from the several major IT market researchers set the pace for expectations, and people being what they are, they are affected (metaphorically speaking) in a relativistic fashion (size warps space and time) and in a quantum fashion (watching an experiment changes it). It gets hard to separate causes from effects in …
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Reliability: An Added Value Of IBM Certified Pre-Owned
August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are many different kinds of reliability that are important in IT infrastructure. There is the obvious one that has to do with the literal quality of the hardware engineering, testing, and manufacturing processes as well as the quality of the systems software that runs atop servers or storage.
But the other kinds of reliability that are equally important is knowing that the manufacturer is standing behind the equipment, supporting it whether it is new or certified pre-owned, in the event that something goes wrong. And as Murphy’s Law tells us and as all system administrators know full well, something …
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The Other IBM Big Iron That Is On The Horizon
August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Hot Chips conference is underway this week, historically at Stanford University but this year as was the case last year, is being done virtually thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. There are a lot of new chips that are being discussed in detail, and one of them is not the forthcoming Power10 chip from IBM, which is expected to make its debut sometime in September and which was one of the hot items at last year’s Hot Chips event.
The one processor that IBM is talking about, however, is the “Telum” z16 processor for System z mainframes, and unlike …
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Balancing Supply And Demand For Impending Big Power10 Iron
August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive …
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Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops
August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.
In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …
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