Timothy Prickett Morgan
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RTPA Looking For A Few Good Software Reviewers
April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Throughout the six decades of commercial computing, one thing has been universally true. Every good application development or system management tool, from the simplest debuggers all the way up to complex DevOps systems that can absorb multiple continuous streams of new code being mashed up against old code without making a mess of things, got its start because some programmer or administrator was so annoyed at how something worked – or more precisely didn’t work – that he or she created a new tool that did the job a whole lot better.
This is precisely the beginning story of Real-Time …
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Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time
April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?
These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …
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What Vintage Is Your IBM i Wine?
April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a long time since we have seen a new version of the IBM i operating system, but if history is any guide, we are on the cusp of yet another release of the platform. And thanks to the way Big Blue handles updates to the software, through its Technology Refresh incremental upgrade process, this will not be as dramatic an event as updating the operating system, middleware, database, and application development tools in the stack has been throughout most of the history of the IBM midrange.
But there are plenty of OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i shops …
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Power Systems Not Getting 3D XPoint Memory Anytime Soon
April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A lot of people don’t remember this, but Intel was founded in 1968 as a maker of semiconductor main memory for mainframes, and in the early 1970s the company commanded almost as much market share in main memory as it does in datacenter compute today. But as competitors in Japan did a better job ramping up new technologies, by the early 1980s Intel’s market share dropped to somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent, and it had no way to easily or affordably get back into the game, and by 1984 it had to wind down its memory operations. …
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Traditional IT Spending Bests Cloud Infrastructure, For Now
April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Drawing the line between what is cloudy and what is not at this point in the history of the information technology business is not a trivial thing. But that’s why the analysts at IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and others get paid the big bucks to dice and slice the market so we can get a better of what is going on.
To hear the big public cloud providers talk, you would think that everything that companies buy to install on premises or rent from their bit barns is cloudy – which means that it is virtualized, available with metered pricing to …
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Rebuilding The Bottom Of The Pyramid
March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about how Big Blue had extended the life of the Power8-based entry Power S812 Mini, announced on Valentine’s Day last year specifically to give entry IBM i shops a cheaper alternative than buying the Power S814 or Power S824. It seems to me that IBM needs to do some rejiggering of the way it bundles and prices this entry machine to get the installed base of customers using vintage hardware and operating systems to get current and stay there.
We are under the impression that the number …
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What Are Your Application Priorities?
March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Money is a proxy for intent, but the amount that companies budget for any particular application, whether it is homegrown or bought off the shelf, is not necessarily a good indicator of the value that they will ultimately derive from that investment. Still, every IT budget is a reflection of both necessity and hope. Some things you simply have to do to even be in business, and other things you do to improve the business. Most of the time it works, sometimes it ends up being a sunk cost with very little benefit.
The analysts at Gartner were kind enough …
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Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life
March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.
We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …
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Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In
March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time here at The Four Hundred thinking about the vintage of the hardware, operating systems, and applications running on the IBM i platform and its forbears. But we are also concerned, as you know, with the vintage of the people who are running and programming the systems out there in the IBM midrange installed base.
It is hard to get any quantifiable data on the people out there running the platforms – and we thank you, as loyal readers of this publication for several decades now for being in this market for even more decades …
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Enterprises Spend On Systems, Hyperscalers Tap The Brakes
March 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For many enterprises, the current generations of processors that come from IBM, Intel, AMD, and the Arm collective are plenty good enough – and available at reasonable price/performance relative to each other and to their predecessors – that the end of 2018 was a perfectly reasonable time to buy what is on the truck. But hyperscalers and public cloud builders, who live and die by the total cost of ownership of their systems as gauged by raw compute power, space required, and power consumed, have to take a longer view. So with new processors coming from Intel and AMD on …
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