• IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

  With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …

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• How Far We Have Come

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the AS/400 turned 29 last week – and yes, I know the stack is called IBM i and I know that it now runs on what IBM calls Cognitive Systems based on Power processors – I happened to be on an airplane coming back from Frankfurt, Germany, after attending the International Supercomputing Conference. As it turns out, the Power9 processor married to Nvidia’s Tesla coprocessors using its “Volta” GPUs was one of the hot topics of conversation, and so was the coherent, shared memory architecture that will lash CPUs and GPUs into a shared memory space of sorts that …

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• The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition

  June 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power9 processor not coming to the IBM i and AIX platforms until sometime early in 2018, rather than right now as many of us were led to believe would be happening, we have some extra time on our hands. So we should all – including the executives who run IBM Systems and its subordinate Cognitive Systems division (formerly known as Power Systems) – take this opportunity to take a hard look at how the IBM i platform is packaged and priced and how a modern integrated platform should be architected.

  The IBM i customer base needs the Cognitive …

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• IBM i And AIX Won’t Get Power9 Until 2018

  June 5, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out yet, IBM’s biggest priority when it comes to the Power9 processor is Linux. Not IBM i and not AIX, which are Big Blue’s own operating system platforms and which have generated the vast majority of revenues for the combined Power platform since Linux made its debut on Power and System z machines almost two decades ago.

  As we have previously reported, IBM is getting ready to launch the Power9 processors sometime in the second half of this year, and officially has not given a precise date for when the first systems using …

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• Clearing The Decks Ahead Of The Power9 Launch

  May 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is ever the way: In with the new and out with the old. With the Power9 processors set for their debut sometime this summer, and shipments beginning in the second half of the year, Big Blue is looking to clear out the inventory of older Power Systems equipment it has sitting around in the barn and to remove older items from its catalog to make room for a slew of new gear.

  Over the past several months, IBM has been doing some spring cleaning, and we thought we would round all of these marketing withdrawals for Power Systems equipment …

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• The Power Systems Decline Did Not Have To Be This Bad

  April 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Thirteen weeks ago, when IBM reported its financial results for its final quarter of 2016, we said that the Power Systems business would decline in every quarter ahead of the Power9 launch, and while this is not a hard thing to predict, it has certainly turned out to be true in the first quarter of 2017. Both IBM’s Power Systems and Systems z machines and their related operating systems were hit by gut-wrenching declines.

  The good news, as we have pointed out time and again, is that IBM’s true systems business is distinct from and is a superset that …

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• Servers Hit The Skids Last Year, This Year Might be No Better

  March 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As the first building block of any system is the server, and watching how these are acquired, managed, and disposed of tells you a lot about what is going on with applications in the datacenter and who is making money off of them. It has been a long time since the Power Systems division at IBM has been an economic powerhouse in the server space, but now even the X86 platform, long dominated by Intel, is starting to show some signs of losing its luster.

  It stands to reason. In the final quarter of this year, X86-based machines accounted for …

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• Some Power Systems Tweaks And Sales Withdrawals

  February 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We didn’t expect any major announcements from IBM’s Power Systems division here in the first couple of weeks of the year, but the company has made done a bunch of little things that might affect some IBM i shops that you ought to be aware of just the same.

  In announcement letter 117-013, which was put out on January 24, IBM made good on its promise to make the new I/O peripherals and memory cards that came out with the midrange Power 850C system announced last year available on the prior generation Power 850 box, which debuted in May …

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• Power Systems Is Now Cognitive Systems

  January 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as we can remember, every couple of years or so IBM has changed the executives that have been in charge of its midrange systems and over a slightly longer term, of maybe five to seven years, it has rebranded or somehow significantly changed the marketing message driving those midrange systems. It looks like 2017 might be a year for both.

  In a series of brief internal memos put out by Ginni Rometty, the company’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, and Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems group, IBM is rejiggering its executive lineup and …

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