Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Drilling Down Into The Power10 Chip Architecture
August 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, we told you some general things about the future Power10 chip from IBM based on a roadmap briefing that we got from the IBM tech team ahead of their presentation at the Hot Chips 32 chip conference last week. IBM was gracious enough to let us talk about the Power10 chip generally before that presentation, because we have a Monday morning deadline no matter what. And this week, we can drill down into the Power10 architectural details a bit more.
The presentation at Hot Chips was given by William Starke, the chief architect of the Power10 processor who …
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Power To The Tenth Power
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is one of my favorite times of the year, with the Hot Chips symposium usually underway this week at Stanford University and all the vendors big and small trotting out their, well, hottest chippery. In this case, hot means “extremely interesting” but it often means “burning shedloads of watts” as well. But this is the time that the chip architects show off what they have been working on for four or five years and what has already been in production in recent months or will be in the coming months.
IBM tends to jump the gun a bit …
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HelpSystems Buys GlobalScape For $217 Million For File Transfer Expansion
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Secure file transfer is a thing, particularly with companies working remotely, and this is why the investors behind the HelpSystems conglomerate are shelling out a whopping $217 million, or $9.50 per share, to buy a publicly traded rival in the secure managed file transfer tool arena called GlobalScape.
The deal offered by HelpSystems and agreed to represents a 16 percent premium over the market capitalization of GlobalScape prior to the announcement of the acquisition, and the deal will be funded by cash on hand at HelpSystems plus new debt that is backed by Jefferies Finance and credit funds affiliated with …
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Accelerating DX Does Not Necessarily Mean Spending More Bucks
August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is important to not confuse activity with the money it generates. While activity and money can sometimes be proportional as well as rising and falling together, it is not always the case that they point in the same direction. And particularly when it comes to IT spending during a pandemic-induced recession that the world has not seen in a hundred years. Equally important to consider is that overall IT spending is not necessarily an indicator of how spending in any particular area will rise and fall. All boats definitely do not rise together, especially in the choppy economic waters …
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Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i
August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.
The fun bit is that not only system software makers like IBM get …
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FlashSystem Gets Nearline Boost, Nutanix On Power Gets The Boot
August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a pretty quiet summer out there in the Big Blue sphere of influence, which includes Power Systems, IBM i, and a few hundred other products and services from IBM and its partners. But in the past several weeks, a bunch of things have happened that we thought you should be made aware of.
On July 21, in announcement letter 120-021, IBM announced that it is now offering a 16 TB 7.2K RPM 12 Gb/sec nearline SAS disk drive option for its FlashSystem arrays. I know what you are thinking – what they heck is a disk drive …
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Getting Out Of The Catch-22 Of Application Transformation
August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If starting up a business is hard, maintaining that business can be even more difficult. Conditions and tastes change over time, and applications that drive the business can feel the strain.
Upper management and IT organizations might have the skills to keep business applications going and make modest changes here and there, or perhaps add a new product line or two. But they usually do not have the time or people to do anything too radical, such as modernizing and transforming those applications to work in completely new ways. This is where bringing in a product and services partner comes …
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How IBM Stacks Power Cloud Up Against AWS And Azure
August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have our own habits when it comes to thinking about bang for the buck, and it is refreshing sometimes to just think about how other companies think about it.
As part of the July 14 announcements now almost three weeks ago, IBM not only rolled out new entry Power9 machines with higher I/O bandwidth as well as utility style pricing for on-premises gear to lower capital expenditures. IBM also did a direct comparison of the Power Systems Virtual Server running on the IBM Cloud for a memory-heavy instance and then compared that to fat memory slices running on Amazon …
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If You Can’t Get To The Tape, It Doesn’t Matter If It Is Dead Or Not
August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The coronavirus pandemic has made most IT shops seriously re-evaluate a number of the technologies they have to maintain, operate, backup, and protect their mission-critical applications and their data. And the companies that have IBM i systems as their main platforms are no more insulated from these issues than those who picked other platforms – although it is safe to say that they have very good tools to help with all of the above, and in many cases, these tools are arguably better than – or identical to – what is available for Windows Server, Linux, or other platforms.
Over …
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Power Systems Slump Is Not As Bad As It Looks
July 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even for companies selling hand sanitizer, face masks, toilet paper, and shotguns, it is still a weird time to be in business just like it is for the rest of us. The Cognitive Systems division within IBM’s Systems group – what most people still call the Power Systems division – is no different.
Big Blue is certainly facing some strong headwinds as it has to get through more than another year before the Power10 rollout begins, and the Power9 machines have really been in the field two and a half years already if you count the launch of the Power …
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