Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Adds Mainstream Flash Drives To Power Systems
August 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We tend to be focused on compute in the IT industry, and the CPUs get a lot of the glory. But the fastest CPU in the world doesn’t amount to anything without peripherals to keep it fed. That is why, of course, that the main frame was called that, after all. There were plenty of other frames surrounding it, making it into a system.
This holds as true for the Power Systems machines as much as any other machine, and whether or not they are running IBM i, too. The good news is that IBM does a fairly good …
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Drilling Down Into The Power E980
August 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
On August 7, IBM announced the two machines that are based on the “Cumulus” scale-up versions of the Power9 processors – the Power E950 midrange box that scales up to four sockets and the Power E980 big iron machine that scales up to 16 sockets. The IBM i platform is not available on the Power E950, so IBM i customers who need more than a two-socket Power9 machine to support their workloads have to make a jump to a single-node implementation of the Power E980.
This is the same situation that customers faced during the Power8 era, so it is …
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IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange
August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.
But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …
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Big Blue Moves Up Technology Refreshes For IBM i
August 6, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We knew that IBM was getting ready to flesh out the Power9 server lineup with the “Cumulus” processors for scale-up systems, used in machines that span from four to 16 sockets in a single system image, and we told you all about that last week for an announcement that is expected to come to pass on August 7. This is fitting with all of the rumors we heard at the beginning of the year, which expected the big iron to come in the third quarter.
Normally, we expect Technology Refresh updates for the current versions and releases of IBM i …
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IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips
July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …
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Introducing Four Hundred Guru Classic
July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Application modernization is all the rage in the IBM i market these days, and for good reason. There is free form RPG that opens up new possibilities, and a slew of new programming languages and frameworks from the open source community that have been added to the platform. Just like some applications need to be updated and some don’t, some tech tips and tricks need to be updated while others don’t. Four Hundred Guru Classic is a new edition of The Four Hundred that is going to reach back into the archive of tech tips and tricks and amalgamate and …
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Outsourcing Comes Back Home
July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Getting a full-time job at a company that uses an IBM i platform as its main backend system is not any easier now that it was a decade or two ago, but getting work in the field – particularly as an independent contractor or one working from an outsourcing provider located within the United States – seems to be looking up.
To get a feel of what is going on out there in the IT job market, we had a chat with Harley Lippman, founder and chief executive officer at Genesis10, which provides job placement services as well as …
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The Frustration Of Not Knowing How We Are Doing
July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The old adage from management guru Peter Drucker is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and it is something that organizations take to heart to run themselves. There is such a thing as taking this all too far, where you spend all your time measuring and managing and not enough time getting actual stuff done, and then there is not having enough information to actually manage well.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public companies, does not, to my knowledge, have explicit guidelines as to how companies report their product and divisional categories. And thus, with each …
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IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom
July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.
In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …
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IBM Tweaks Memory And I/O For Entry Power9 Iron
July 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The summer is usually pretty quiet in IBM i Land, and this one is no exception. But things do still happen, and it is our job – and we like our job – to keep you informed of things when they do.
On July 10, while IT Jungle was away on summer break, Big Blue did some tweaks and changes for various elements of the entry Power9 machines that started rolling out this year. These are all little things, but as usual, the little things can add up.
In announcement letter 118-058, IBM has interestingly announced a new 8 …
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