Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Removing The Last Governor: Core Software Pricing
July 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This being near the July 4th holiday in America, which is a significant time for me and my life with The Four Hundred, I am going to ask your indulgence and tell you a story or two.
When I first moved to New York City way back in December 1988, it was not the first time that I had encountered a recession. But it was an important one that changed my life and, I like to think, yours.
My parents were the grandchildren of farmers, and their parents worked in the factories of upstate rural New Jersey – there …
Read more -
A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat
June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.
Jim …
Read more -
IT Spending To Boom In 2018, Tails Off In 2019
June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say what is the cart and what is the horse in the elements that make up an economy. Our sense of how well or poorly the economy is doing actually affects how we react and therefore how we actually spend on goods and services, and therefore there is always an element of self-fulfilling prophecy mixed in with the underlying fundamentals. It is hard to predict what an economy is going to do, much less 185 different ones that are interconnected on planet Earth, and it is even harder, perhaps, to reckon what one aspect of those …
Read more -
A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability
June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.
That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …
Read more -
As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow
June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.
This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …
Read more -
IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron
June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …
Read more -
UCG Becomes The Guardian Of Contract Management
June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The small and medium business market for systems has always been larger than the AS/400 and its progeny, and even if the AS/400 loomed larger in decades past, it has been a long time since people in the IBM i market thought that everything can and should be done on the platform. Some applications work just fine running alongside the AS/400 and its integrated database, and other applications are freestanding and complementary.
Jim Kandrac, the founder and president of UCG Technologies, the IBM i system reseller located outside of Cleveland, Ohio, that is best known for its VAULT400 cloud …
Read more -
Happy Days Are Here Again For Systems
June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A combination of increases in memory and CPU prices, beefier configurations often with GPU or FPGA accelerators, and outright ebullient demand for compute capacity is making the server business look like it is exploding when it is merely expanding at a more-than-healthy clip.
In the first quarter, according to the box counters at IDC, server revenues were up an astounding 38.6 percent to $18.82 billion, the kind of number we have never seen in the history of the server racket. Server shipments – and it is getting hard to count the nodes sometimes – rose by 20.7 percent to just …
Read more -
Inside IBM’s SAP HANA On Power Playbook
May 21, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power Systems line is in transition right now, making the jump from Power8 to Power9 processors, and yet the company wants to continue selling applications without having customers wait for the newer chip to be available across the entire Power Systems portfolio. This is a particular problem when it comes to the HANA in-memory database on Power Systems, which IBM is eager to sell given the higher memory capacity and bandwidth that Power9 offers compared to the Xeon processors from Intel.
To help business partners that are peddling SAP suites on Power, which includes the IBM i platform, in …
Read more -
Getting Hyper And Converged With IBM i
May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The hallmark of the System/38 and its progeny, the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms, is that these machines came fully integrated with all of the operating system, database, management, and development tools necessary to run a modern business. Integrated did not mean that these pieces were all sold as a single bundle, mind you, but they snapped together with good fit and finish and allowed companies to not have to become masters of the system code and could therefore be craftsman for the application code that actually ran the business.
The AS/400 really set the pace for …
Read more