Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Big Blue Offers Managed Services For PowerVS Private Cloud Pods
May 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are lots of ways to skin the cloud infrastructure cat. You can rent cloudy capacity and manage it yourself. That is called Power Virtual Server. You can buy your own virtualized Power Systems servers and manage them with the same control plane as is used for the PowerVS cloud. That is called Power Virtual Server Private Cloud, of PowerVS Private Cloud for short. (Sort of.)
And now, with announcement letter AD24-0420, Big Blue is offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it from the company’s own …
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What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At
May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.
After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar …
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Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012
May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.
Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …
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IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System
May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.
Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …
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Power Systems Poised To Embiggen This Year?
May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We were away on a hiatus and not publishing last week, and therefore we are now going to go through Big Blue’s financial results for the first quarter of 2024, and take a deep dive into its systems business and Power Systems in particular. Once again, the news is generally good, and that is comforting when this is the final third of the Power10 and System z16 product lines from IBM, with follow-on Power11 and System z17 processors expected sometime next year.
In the March quarter, IBM reported overall revenues of $14.46 billion, up 4.1 percent year on year, with …
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What Big Blue’s HashiCorp Buy Might Mean For The IBM i Platform
May 6, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Here is a riddle for you, or even two. Why did IBM buy systems software maker HashiCorp for $6.4 billion? And what on Earth, if anything, will this mean for IBM i customers, or even Power Systems customers in general?
If you want to get a deeper background into HashiCorp, check out the Related Stories link at the bottom of this story for the detailed analysis I have done on the company over at The Next Platform. In the meantime, a short overview of HashiCorp and its tools is in order.
Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, the co-founders of …
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LightEdge Acquires Connectria To Round Out Each Other’s Power Play
April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there is a large group of IT customers who pay a premium for a premium product but who are also going to be experiencing a skills shortage in the coming years, then you want to be in the position of selling them networking, compute, and storage capacity in the cloud or in co-location facilities. And you also want to be able to sell them add-on managed services to get a bigger share of their overall budget while also helping them to get more things done.
That, in a nutshell, is why LightEdge Solutions is acquiring Connectria Hosting. Both companies …
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Gartner: IT Spending To Grow Faster Than Expected In 2024
April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The adoption of generative AI by enterprises and the acceleration of the rates of use of IT services from outside consultants to get stuff done is going to boost IT spending higher than expected this year, according to the prognosticators at Gartner.
In terms of aggregate dollars, the effect if the latter is much larger than the former. The broad IT services category is now expected to account for $1,520 billion in spending worldwide this year, up 9.7 percent compared to last year and representing a $19 billion increase from the forecast that Gartner made in January. It will not …
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Drilling Down Into New IBM i Perpetual And Subscription Pricing
April 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we reported in last week’s issue, Big Blue increased pricing on its pricing for per-core perpetual software licenses, per user licensing fees, Software Maintenace, and subscription prices back on January 1. We missed the change – again, apologies for that – and let you know about the basics of these and other hardware and software price changes. This week we are going to look at the effect of these changes on the cost of the base IBM i systems software stack.
To review: On September 9 last year, IBM announced the price increases that went into effect as …
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Details On The IBM i Subscription Conversion Deals For P05 And P10 Tiers
April 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you are well aware by now, Big Blue is in the middle of changing from perpetual licensing plus Software Maintenance for the IBM i stack to subscription pricing that includes licensing and tech support for the software all in one annual subscription. And this is happening at the same time that IBM has raised software prices and maintenance prices for that software across the board, which we will report on separately, and the company has said that it will withdraw new perpetual software license software sales for IBM i on its Power Systems line on May 27.
That withdrawal …
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