• Having Second Thoughts About New Power Systems Iron?

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when midrange computers cost somewhat more than they do today (without adjusting for inflation, mind you) and the amount of processing, memory, storage, and networking capacity of the boxes was absolutely miniscule compared to what we can buy today (but sufficient to the task), customers looking to add more AS/400 or iSeries capacity to their datacenter didn’t have to shop around a current N generation or N-1 generation machine, but they could also look into the secondhand market for used N-1, N-2, and even N-3 generation machines and try to buy capacity on the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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• Power Systems Hit By The Pandemic In Q1 2020

  April 27, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2019, we told you that the Power9 platform was entering the long tail, that part of the cycle of the this generation of Power Systems machines where the revenue would dwindle off between that time and when the Power10 servers launch sometime in 2021. That tail perhaps just got a little longer and skinnier thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

  IBM doesn’t talk very much about the specifics of revenues and profits for the Power Systems line any more, just like it stopped talking about the iSeries …

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• Where Is The Power Systems-IBM i Stimulus Package?

  April 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The governments of the world are spending to try to compensate for the economic slowdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is the right thing to do. We wonder why IBM has not done more to help its Power Systems business.

  Just before the coronavirus pandemic really started to kick in throughout Europe and the United States, and as the Power9 family of Power Systems machines was entering the long tail part of its sales cycle, IBM announced a deal in Europe that gave customers buying its so-called scale out (what we would call entry) one-socket and two-socket …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• GiAPA Tackles IBM i Performance Bottlenecks

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are frustrated with persistent performance problems may want to check out an innovative tool called GiAPA. Developed by the Danish firm iPerformance ApS, the tool has alleviated bottlenecks and saved millions of dollars for some of the biggest IBM i shops in the world. Kaare Plesner, the tool’s creator, recently shared his story with IT Jungle.

  In the early 1980s, Plesner returned to Denmark after spending a year abroad working as a mainframe systems programmer. The System/38 was quickly being adopted, but Plesner noticed that it didn’t have the same level of operational tooling that …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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• Boadway’s 25-Year Performance Shows No Let Up

  March 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Batch jobs running a little long? Throw some hardware at it. For as long as Mike Boadway can remember, that’s been the default response to dealing with most performance issues on the IBM i server. But when today’s fast Power9 processors and Flash drives fail to move the performance needle, maybe it’s worth reconsidering Boadway’s approach to tweaking the code and the data instead.

  As the CEO of MB Software & Consulting, Boadway makes his living off solving other people’s IBM i performance issues. Since founding the company in 1995, Boadway has used his proprietary software to deliver an …

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• How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong

  February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

  In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …

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