Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat
October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.
Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …
Read more -
Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems
October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.
Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …
Read more -
It’s Your Last Chance To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are coming down to the final stretch and we need you to take a few minutes and participate in the IBM i Marketplace Survey that has been done for the past several years by HelpSystems. The survey takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.
The community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior, and Big Blue is more open about this process than many IT suppliers even if it might not feel like it sometimes. So this is your chance …
Read more -
Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM
October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.
In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …
Read more -
It’s Time To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey Again
October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Another year has come and gone, and it is once again time to take the pulse of the IBM i community and see what is exciting and raising that pulse and what is not.
We truly are a community, and it helps to know what is going on. IBM doesn’t provide much insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, much less the IBM i platform within it, so we have learned to rely on surveys by user groups and by the major software vendors in the community to try to figure out what is going on out there …
Read more -
Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year
October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.
In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …
Read more -
The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close
October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.
Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …
Read more -
Riding The Upgrade Cycle
October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In an ideal world, all servers would always be new and all operating systems and applications would be patched and running in optimal form. But we don’t live in that world. And that means for many customers that don’t have bales of money sitting around, sometimes the IBM i platform starts to get a little long in the tooth.
That is certainly the case for parts of the IBM i installed base. There are still a lot of Power5 and Power5+ customers out there who have resisted the temptation to upgrade their systems for the past five or six generations, …
Read more -
The Cloud Changes Things, But Not Everything
October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the slowest things in the world is the pace at which risk averse enterprises change their information technology. We have been talking about computing on demand and utility computing for more than two decades, and Amazon Web Services made the cloud a real thing with the launch of its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service back in March 2006. Fast forward 12 years, and EC2 is the foundation of a vast business that made $21.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, and it has utterly transformed the way people want to configure IT infrastructure so it …
Read more -
The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax
October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.
This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …
Read more