Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power S812 Gets Another Reprieve, And Other Power Systems Stuff
December 2, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For whatever reason, Big Blue did not create a cut-down version of the Power9 entry server aimed at the smallest of the small businesses that run themselves on the IBM i platform. Meaning there was no Power S912 or Power S912 Mini replacement for the Power S812 and its specially priced Power S812 Mini. (The former is based on the Power9 chip, while the latter is based on the older Power8 chip, which has a lot less oomph per core.)
Back in March, IBM extended the life of the Power S812 and its Mini variant until November 29 of this …
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IBM i Marketing: Not A Thankless Job
November 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For over one decade of the three that I called New York City my home, I was the president of the board of directors in the co-operative apartment building in which I lived. For many years, I ran a half rack of servers and storage in the kitchenette in our apartment to support IT Jungle’s website and subscription database, and I ran T1 lines up the outside of the building and in through the window. It was unconventional running a business that way, but there was no cloud computing as we know it, and certainly not at the prices you …
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Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Red Hat Linux
November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support.
Just as a recap from last week’s …
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Private Cloud Spending Steady, Public Cloud Declines
November 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is interesting to watch the progress of the transition from traditional bare metal machines running discrete workloads on separate systems to cloudy infrastructure that is virtualized and is therefore more malleable and also allows for the utilization to be driven up on systems.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the traditional, monolithic architecture is going away over the long term, but in the short term, cloudy infrastructure – at least determined by the amount of money that regular enterprises as well as the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and other service providers spend – rises and falls and is still …
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The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers
November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.
The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …
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Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server
November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.
This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …
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The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i
November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A couple of weeks ago, buried in the October Power Systems announcements, we told you about the new NVM-Express flash cards that Big Blue brought to the Power iron and that are specifically enabled in the IBM i 7.4 release with Technology Refresh 1, or TR1. We didn’t have a lot of detail back then about the new drives other than some capacities and pricing, but we know more now and we are going to tell you what we know.
We will circle back with Big Blue and have a discussion about what the addition of NVM-Express flash means – …
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More Vintage Power Systems Stuff Gets The Plug Pulled
November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are well into the Power9 era and looking ahead to the Power10 and Power11 era, so it is no surprise at all that IBM is looking to streamline its product catalog and empty out its barns of old equipment. In announcement letter 919-139, which somehow slipped our attention two weeks ago on October 22, a whole bunch of Power Systems stuff got the axe, with withdrawal dates ranging from right now until February 2020.
On October 22, IBM i 6.1.1, with its machine code, will no longer be available for ordering on a slew of machines. This is …
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Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms
October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no shortage of IBM i shops that are sitting on back releases of the operating system and related systems software, or older Power Systems iron, or both. Sometimes, it takes a little convincing to get upper management to listen about how IT operations could be improved and extended if the company would only make some investments in upgrading the hardware and systems software. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, particularly when many small and medium businesses are run by their owners and in a certain sense any money that would be allocated for an upgrade is their …
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Big Power8 Iron Gets A Reprieve, And More Power To You
October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The big Power9 iron has been in the field for more than a year now, and IBM had every intention of removing the Power8-based Power E870C and Power E880 E880C from its product catalog by Halloween, and said as much on February 26 this year in an announcement that we covered about a slew of withdrawals for the Power Systems platform.
In announcement 119-078, dated October 22, IBM has decided to keep the For Sale signs up on the eight-socket Power E870C and 16-socket Power E880C machines for an extra two months, and now you will be able …
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