Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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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In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …
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No More Shouting The Name “Power” (Well, Except In Our Title Here)
August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.
One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my …
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The Three Challenges To Securing Your IBM i Platform
July 28, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever you have to tackle a complex problem, it is best to break it down and then figure out a way to take on the most important and impactful issues first. And when it comes to securing the IBM i platform, nobody knows better than Carol Woodbury, president and chief technology officer at DXR Security, about how to take this “securable” system and lock it down.
Woodbury spent 16 years at IBM from 1984 through 2000, rising to become security team leader for the AS/400 platform and eventually becoming chief engineering manager for security for the platform. After leaving Big …
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Awaiting The Power10 Rollout And The New Sales Cycle
July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is difficult to be patient but before too long IBM will begin shipping Power10-based systems and the product line, which has been bumping along at the tail end of the Power9 cycle, will start growing again. With IBM having a new microarchitecture as well as a new foundry partner, Samsung Electronics, which is making its very first server chip with the Power10 and implementing its first large-scale chip with a 7 nanometer process, the stakes are high and IBM is being a little extra cautious in getting the Power10 chip out the door.
Enterprise customers are risk averse, and …
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Giving IBM i The Storage Of Last Resort
July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every IT ecosystem has its niche players, and they are a vital part of that ecosystem just as are niche players as in the natural ecosystem. Lots of companies bridge the gaps between products and allow customers to do something that would be hard for them to replicate on their own. This brings real value.
Entrepid Corporation is one such niche player in the IBM i and broader Power Systems market, and it bridges the gap between IBM’s Power-based systems commonly used as database and application servers in midrange and large enterprises and the storage offered by EMC before and …
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Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360
July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.
Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …
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