Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Some More Power Systems Stuff Swept Into The Dustbin
March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the Power10 machines starting to come out later this year, the Power9 machines in the field for three years or so depending on the make and model, and the Power8 machines looking long in the tooth (but still technically and economically viable), you have to expect that Big Blue will wind down the sale of more and more older features.
In announcement letter 923-035, IBM has done just that. Nothing too big, but we think you need to be made aware of it just the same. And as you might expect, IBM also put a plug into the …
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Don’t Be A Blowhard
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.
Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …
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It’s Harder To Hear The Pulse In The Server Market
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
More than any other piece of equipment that does into the datacenter, the server is an indicator of health and wealth. Over the more than three decades that The Four Hundred has been published, we have spent a lot of effort and time to understand how the world is investing in what kinds of servers, including Big Blue’s midrange systems running OS/400 and IBM i, and how the trends change over time. And we are committed to doing that going forward, even though it has just gotten a little bit more difficult.
For the past several decades – I honestly …
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IBM i Wish List: Add A Virtual IBM i Platform Like System z Wazi
March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Serendipity is a funny thing; part serene and part dippy, I suppose. I was poking around for something interesting that might be relevant to the IBM i platform, and ran across announcement letter 221-122, which was for something called IBM Wazi Developer for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. I had recently heard of CodeReady Workspaces because of the recent Power Systems announcements, but I had no idea what Wazi was.
What I now know is that I want this in an IBM i flavor.
There is no such thing as a portable and cheap and ubiquitous System z mainframe environment, …
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IBM i Bucking The Trends, Year After Year
March 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are all kinds of stability that we consider when we choose and use systems. In the IBM i market in particular, we often talk about stability in the sense of the good programming practices that companies or their third-party software vendors have for the applications that they run. Or we might talk about the underlying stability of the operating system, relational database, or middleware software on which these applications depend. Or digging down further, we might talk about the reliability and longevity and predictability of the Power Systems hardware that underlies it all. And then, of course, there is …
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We Want IBM i On The Future Power E1050
March 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred thinking about the entry and midrange part of the Power Systems line and the many tens of thousands of customers who make use of these machines as their mission critical, back end, system of record platforms. But with the only Power10 machines coming out this year expected to be at the high end – call them the four-socket Power E1050 and the 16-socket Power E1080, if IBM iterates its currently used naming scheme – we have little choice but to start thinking of the big iron now and worry about …
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Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.
As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …
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IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.
IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …
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Some Practical Advice On That HMC-Power9 Impedance Mismatch
March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In any modern IT infrastructure – be it compute, storage, or networking – there is an increasing architectural movement to break control planes from the compute, storage, or networking planes. In this sense, the Hardware Management Console, which people have been complaining about since it was launched so long ago we can’t even remember it.
The HMC debuted as an external controller for system configuration and logical partition configuration with the Power5-based “Squadron” line of servers running OS/400 back in 2004, including the Power 520 and the Power 570 as well as the Power 575, Power 590, and Power 595 …
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Tech Data’s Take On Certified Pre-Owned IT Gear
February 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be ironic, but even the largest sellers of new datacenter equipment in the world sometimes have to – and eagerly want to – sell used IT equipment. And if they are smart – and the executives at Tech Data certainly are on behalf of their downstream reseller and end user customers – they stick to certified pre-owned equipment with the backing of the original equipment manufacturers.
When Tech Data was founded in Clearwater, Florida by Edward Raymond in 1974, the company sold various peripherals and supplies for minicomputer and mainframe systems. The company branched out into PC distribution …
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