Timothy Prickett Morgan
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For The Prices They Are A-Changin’
October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.
Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …
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What IBM i Shops Want From Cloud, And How To Do It Right
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is no secret to readers of The Four Hundred that we are big proponents of so-called cloud computing, which doesn’t just include access to slices of servers but also storage to keep their data and networking to link them to the world and, if multiple slices share work, to link them to storage and to each other.
We never liked the term “cloud,” because it connotes a fuzzy kind of infrastructure when quite the opposite is true. We still don’t like calling it cloud computing, but language is created by consensus, not by fiat, so sometimes we have to …
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Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate
September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …
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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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