Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1
October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.
I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …
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The Smearing Of Infrastructure And Platform Clouds
October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The largest public clouds on the planet are also among the most secretive and influential companies in the IT sector, and therefore despite events that go one for days or, now in the time of coronavirus, for weeks on end, we get very little actual information out of them about specifically what is going on in the cloud market with any amount of specificity.
Yes, everybody and anybody who is an incumbent in the IT sector talks about how their “cloud” business is doing, and at least one of the big IT market researchers is sort of throwing up its …
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Max Thread Room
September 28, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For a lot of organizations that buy servers and create systems out of them, the overall throughput of each single machine is the most important performance metric they care about. But for a lot of IBM i shops and indeed even System z mainframe shops, the performance of a single core is the most important metric because most IBM i customers do not have very many cores at all. Some have only one, others have two, three, or four, and most do not have more than that although there are some very large Power Systems running IBM i. But that …
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Now You Can Transform RPG Code Into PHP
September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Assuming an average of 5 million lines of code at IBM i shops – a number I heard recently thrown around – in their homegrown or heavily customized third party applications, IBM i shops are collectively sitting on something like 750 billion lines of code. Just ponder that for a minute.
This code, which is predominantly written in RPG but with a fair proportion of Java and COBOL plus a smattering of more modern languages, is going to have to be maintained and tweaked in the coming years. Just like it had to be updated and debugged time and again …
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The Dollars And Sense Of Business Continuity
September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those companies that have been in the IBM midrange market for a long time and are still alive and kicking have undergone a lot of change over the decades. But as is also the case, the core people at the company have been there for a long, long time and they understand how to leverage change to drive business and absorb change to help customers cope.
That is one of the secrets of longevity for Datanational, founded in September 1979, which is located in the Farmington Hills suburbs of Detroit and which has always had a strong presence in …
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The Converged Systems Conundrum
September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The idea behind converged and hyperconverged systems was one that AS/400 and IBM i shops have long been familiar with, but which customers using other systems had become unfamiliar with or had never known as they adopted other systems for their mission critical systems. It’s so simple that it can be expressed in one word: integration. Yes, that’s the i in IBM i, and while this is the hallmark of the System/38, the System/36, and the AS/400 platforms from decades ago, ironically the IBM i platform is not considered a converged or hyperconverged platform by the market researchers at …
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Just How Big Is The Whole Power Systems Business?
September 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There may be a lot of economic uncertainty out there in the world, due to medical and political uncertainty that seems to be all over the globe, but there is one thing you can count on: Companies need more compute capacity to do ever-more intricate processing.
In the second quarter ended in June, the server market turned in one of the best quarters in its history – even when you consider the inflation adjusted revenues from the peak Dot-Com Boom nearly two decades ago as 2000 was coming to a close. According to the research done by IDC, server spending …
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Driving System TCO With IBM Global Asset Recovery Services
September 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When economic times are uncertain, that means by necessity that IT budgets are also uncertain, and saying that IT is the core of the business and that software is eating the world does nothing to change these hard, cold, capital facts. And that is why in these times people often turn to used, refurbished, certified pre-owned, or even remanufactured IT equipment instead of trying to get the acquisition of a PC, laptop, a smartphone, a switch, a storage array, or a server by the bean counters in the accounting department.
This is no different than what many of us experience …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems
August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.
This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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IBM Clarifies Utility Pricing, Adds Solution Edition For New Entry Power Server
August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in the middle of July, IBM announced new entry Power Systems servers – tweaks to the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 to be specific – that had expanded PCI-Express 4.0 I/O capability as well as a new utility pricing scheme on the Power S922 and Power S924 that helps to lower the capital outlay for buying servers and makes it a little bit more like the economic experience on the public clouds.
This utility pricing, known as the Power Systems Private Cloud Solution, has been available the Power E950 midrange and Power E980 high-end systems since it …
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