Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Hardware, Software, And Support Prices Hiked
April 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last fall/summer we caught wind of the fact that IBM was going to raise prices on hardware and software effective this year, and then we never saw the announcement letter from Big Blue on General Price Harmonization or the one on price increases relating specifically to Power Systems and IBM i.
As it turns out, those announcements were made on September 1 last year and they went into effect on January 1 – something that was not apparent to us (or the business partners that we talk to from time to time) until we were reviewing the subscription pricing deal …
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LTO Cartridge – Drive Compatibility Matrix Not As Deep As You Think
March 27, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A bunch of IBM i shops that must be in the process of upgrading their tape backup systems reached out to the techies that are part of the IT Jungle collective recently and expressed surprise or dismay when they thought that the LTO 9 tape drives they were looking at would be able to read tape cartridges written by LTO 7 drives or that LTO 8 drives would be able to read LTO 6 cartridges.
This, after all, has been the pattern that we have seen in the market for a long, long time. LTO 5 drives can read and …
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What Do Secondhand Power9 Machines Cost These Days?
March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Before IBM consolidated its Global Asset Recovery Services arm in the Systems group in the wake of the spinout of the Kyndryl outsourcing and services business, we could go out to the IBM web site every now and then and get a sense of what secondhand Power Systems machinery cost. But alas, that is no longer the case.
And so, we went poking around the Internet late on a Friday night and stumbled across our old friends at Data Tech Computer Services in Alpharetta, Georgia, which have been in business nearly three decades peddling AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM …
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The Low Down On Service Extension For IBM i 7.X Releases
March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of our discussion two weeks ago of the long-lived releases of IBM i and OS/400 and how they compare in terms of technical support and bug fix coverage to Linux and Windows Server, we got a bunch of questions about just when the service extension – what we call extended support like other operating system vendors – would end.
We understood the very high price that customers pay for service extension – as brilliantly outlined in a piece by Steve Pitcher back in October 2023, which showed the high price that the cumulative cost stacks up …
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Yet More Announcements On IBM i Software Subscriptions
March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the past two years, Big Blue has done of lot of things to repackage the IBM i software stack, and even its entry Power Systems machinery, to be consistent with the modern world of utility pricing for IT systems. Many are not thrilled by this, of course, and not just because they are resistant to change. While IBM is bundling in many features and add-ons to the stack for free as it shifts to subscriptions, the core IBM i subscriptions are without question more expensive than buying a perpetual license and paying Software Maintenance over a five, six, or …
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The Time Is Now To Get A GenAI Strategy
March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I was born a little less than a year after IBM launched its venerable System/360 mainframe platform, arguably the first information technology platform ever created and sold at scale. I graduated from college six months after the AS/400 was launched and was the founding editor of this newsletter you are now reading a little more than a year after Silverlake came to market and showed what a real platform could look like.
I was present during the Unix revolution, the client/server revolution, the commercial Internet revolution, and the big data revolutions, and I was absolutely at the forefront of commercial …
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Sundry IBM Tape Subsystem Announcements
March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM has been shipping tape drives and tape libraries based on LTO-9 tape cartridge technology for nearly three years, which is why we think it is odd that last week we saw that the TS2290 machine now has a feature code to attach to IBM i or OS/400 systems.
In announcement letter AD24-0463, which is pretty terse as these things go, we see that there is a new feature code 9400 for the TS2290 tape drive, also known as the 3580 Model H9S. This appears to be just a feature code to allow for direct attachment of the TS2290 …
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Big Blue Goes After Healthcare With Aggressive Power Systems Pricing
March 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We often gently admonish the vendors in the IBM i market that they have to make news to be in the news and also to do something snazzy, like a special promotion or a price cut to get the attention of customers as well as to stimulate a little business for themselves and their partners. IBM is not excepted from this advice, and is actually doing it – at least for customers in the healthcare industry that run their applications on Power Systems iron.
In announcement letter AD23-0111, dated March 12, IBM has put out a new 24-core Power10 …
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It Would be Uncommon For IBM Announcements To Not Be In May
March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For as long as we can remember, there is a general trend of spring and fall announcements for the IBM midrange. It is not a perfect correlation, of course. The original AS/400 announcement was done on the summer solstice on June 21, 1988, which does not fit the pattern we are talking about. But in general, the spring-fall pattern is something that goes back long before enterprise Linux releases and OpenStack releases all shifted to an April-October cadence.
This being a new year and the POWERUp2024 conference being held May 20 through 23 in Fort Worth, Texas, we are …
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The Long And IBM i Road That Leads To Your Door
March 11, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to find a modern platform that has such a long heritage as the machine on which your company’s business runs. Depending on when you want to draw the lines, the IBM i platform running on Power Systems iron dates back to the System/3 in 1969 or the System/38 in 1978 or the System/36 in 1983 or the AS/400 in 1988. No matter which line you want to draw, that is a long time for a continuously upgradable and upgraded operating system and database platform combination and its underlying hardware.
Not only do the predecessors of the IBM …
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