• No Room For Cloudy Thinking When Moving To The Cloud

  October 15, 2018 Doug Mewmaw

  With new IT innovation, comes new IT thinking. That’s the way it’s always been.

  Right now, that new shiny IT toy that everyone must have is the cloud. In fact, the global market for managed services will grow from $107 billion in 2014 to $193 billion by 2019. As a result, Managed Services Providers (MSPs) are trying to convince CIOs to not only outsource their data center administration, but to trust them that they can manage their entire IT enterprise cheaper and more efficiently.

  Unfortunately, they both may just have their head in the clouds. You see, I’ve been here …

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• 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 …

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• Bang For The Buck On Power9 Entry Hardware

  March 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes right down to it, there are three things that drive a server upgrade or new system purchase among IBM midrange shops: They have an aging system that has to be replaced, workloads are expanding and driving new capacity, or new workloads are being added to the system. In many cases, the situation involves two or even all three of these factors. But what gets the deal done is the value that the new system brings above and beyond satisfying those needs. You have to get a good deal so everyone looks like a hero.

  The good news …

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• The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown

  March 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting to see what impact on performance the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution patches, which plug some security vulnerability holes that search engine giant Google discovered last summer and made public in early January, would have on Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system.

  Now that Big Blue has published the first edition of the Power Systems Performance Report that includes the new “ZZ” Power 9-based systems, we not only get a sense of the relative performance of the “Nimbus” Power9 chip for entry servers. We also can figure out the performance impact of the …

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• IBM Preps Power9 “ZZ” Systems For Imminent Launch

  February 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I told you that the market was getting restless for the rollout of the mainstream servers based on the Power9 processor, and Jenny Thomas, our publisher, commented on our @ITJungleNews Twitter feed that it was also me that was getting restless. Indeed, I am. My iron level is getting low, I suppose.

  Well, the good news for both you and me is that the “ZZ” variants of the Power Systems platforms, which we talked about last week based on the chatter we have been hearing, are coming sooner rather than later. …

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