Timothy Prickett Morgan
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After Seven Quarters Of Growth, Power Systems Declines
October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The tough compares have hit home on IBM’s Power Systems business, but the good news is that this has happened after seven consecutive quarters of growth for the Power-based server business that Big Blue owns lock, stock, and barrel. Even with this decline, which was quite steep because of the triple whammy of tough compares (more on that in a moment), there is still a healthy underlying Power Systems business that is much better off than the last time it was hit by similar declines.
Let’s take a look at the numbers for IBM’s Power Systems division and then work …
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Staying On Top Of High Availability At HelpSystems
October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
HelpSystems got its start in systems management and automation software and has expanded its solution portfolio over the years to include cybersecurity, business intelligence, document management, robotic process automation, capacity management, and more. More recently, HelpSystems entered the IBM i high availability (HA) arena with their Bug Busters acquisition in 2016. I recently checked in with Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, and Tim Woodfield, director of development, to get an update on the company’s HA offering.
“HelpSystems does a good job of listening to the things our customers like and don’t like about their …
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An 11-Core Power9 Makes The Rounds, And Other Hardware Enhancements
October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those of us who go way back in the IBM midrange are used to rhythm in hardware announcements. In the early days, there were several announcements per year as new processors were rolled out across the product line and new peripherals for various kinds of storage and networking were rolled out. The pace was brisk back in the day, with nearly annual processor upgrades and associated updates to systems.
These days, systems are really updated every three years or so, but still, there is the vestigial spring/fall announcement cadence when Big Blue now does Technology Refreshes for the IBM i …
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Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems
October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.
In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.
The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …
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IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes
October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.
We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.
First of …
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Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help
October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.
These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …
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Power7 And Power7+ Will Truly Be Dead At The End Of 2020
October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are five dates that define the life of a piece of software and hardware: When it is announced, when it is generally available, when it is withdrawn from marketing, when service is withdrawn on the product, and when extended service (which is limited and which costs a lot more money than regular service) is dropped and the product is truly done for.
With software, IBM sometimes provides service, service extension, extended service extension, and even extended-extended service extension. I am not making this up, and yes it sounds like the Monty Python SPAM skit. Take a look:
As you …
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Power9 Prime Previews Future Power10 Memory Boost
September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Customers who are deploying Linux on Power Systems iron from Big Blue are about to get a very substantial boost in memory bandwidth as IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9’ (that’s a prime symbol, not an apostrophe or a typo, after the 9) processor. As we previewed back in March 2018, the Power9’ chip will feature a substantially upgraded memory subsystem that has a new, faster SERDES signaling technology, normally used for various kinds of system and accelerator interconnect, that has been tweaked to support memory buffers and therefore DDR4 and future memories.
There is no technical …
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Hyperconverged Takes The Mantle Of Integrated Systems
September 30, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes IBM sets the trends in the midrange, and sometimes it bucks them. The AS/400 was, in many respects, an integrated system and a hyperconverged system long before those words were ever used, but the way its storage and networking is architected, you could argue that the platform that it has fallen outside of these definitions. But as many expected, integrated systems in many different flavors have found favor in the datacenters of the world, and predominately at what in the past would have been midrange shops running proprietary minicomputers.
According to the latest research by IDC, sales of converged …
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You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places
September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …
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