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Big Blue Raises IBM i Software Maintenance Fees Modestly

March 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the AS/400 days when software was a much smaller part of the overall cost of a system, there were relatively frequent prices changes for both OS/400 and related systems software as well as for the software maintenance applied to OS/400 and those related systems programs.

It has been a long time since IBM increased the license or IBM i Group Software Maintenance, or SWMA as we often call it as shorthand (pronounced Swammah). I can’t even remember the last time IBM i license prices were increased, but I know there was an attempt to raise SWMA prices …
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From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable

January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.

But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …
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How The Latest TRs Bolster HA/DR And Security

October 28, 2019 Alex Woodie

High availability, disaster recovery, and security are more important than ever, as enterprises look for ways to eliminate risks to their operations, applications, and data. To that end, it’s not surprising that IBM bolstered the HA/DR and security capabilities in IBM i with the latest Technology Refreshes that are slated to begin shipping November 15.

Let’s start with the new HA features in Db2 Mirror for IBM i, the new business continuity offering that implements an active-active database cluster atop two unique IBM i logical partitions. Db2 Mirror, you’ll remember, was delivered with IBM i version 7.4, so it’s …
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Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …
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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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Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

November 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of different pressures in the 185 countries that comprise most of the economic activity on Earth, and there is no shortage of uncertainty out there. But two things are always constant here in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The first is that uncertainty is always there, even though it gets more or less volatile from time to time. And the other is that companies will continue to invest in hardware, software, services, and telecom services.

They have no choice, living in the future as we do.

The prognosticators at Gartner have taken …
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Big Blue Raises IBM i Software Maintenance Fees Modestly

From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable

How The Latest TRs Bolster HA/DR And Security

Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

Gartner Shaves 2018 And 2019 IT Spending Projections

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

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Search