IBM has agreed to pay $34 billion for leading Linux vendor Red Hat. The sum is 70% above the current market cap for Red Hat which, as of Sunday, was just $20.53bn. This is also the biggest acquisition in the history of IBM by a significant margin. The previous record was $5bn for Cognos in 2008. Last [...]
Organisations are increasingly moving their computing and storage needs to the cloud. The latter is a challenge. Regulators are adding new controls around privacy and data sovereignty. This is one of the reasons why some companies have kept their storage onsite rather than take advantage of the lower prices and greater availability that cloud offers. [...]
There is a seemingly endless round of global conferences focused on blockchain as the solution to everything. Many of these conferences seem to be little more than a thinly disguised attempt to peddle crypto currencies. At MoneyConf Dublin there was, for once, some balance in the discussion. This was the first year the MoneyConf had [...]
Not quite halfway through the two-year IBM z14 lifecycle, the company has announced two new models. These are designed to appeal not just to existing customers but also to new customers as the company targets its biggest year for mainframe sales in over a decade. Yes, that does say over a decade. In reality, CIC [...]
At IBM THINK 2018 in Las Vegas on 19th March, IBM has highlighted five future technologies it is working on. All of these technologies started life in IBM research labs. It is likely that IBM will seek to commercialise some of these itself and with the help of specialist partners. What is interesting about this [...]
IBM delivered the first of its POWER9 units to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories back in July 2017. This is a deployment that will take several months to complete. It also began deploying units to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the end of October 2017. These two announcements mean that customers and that includes [...]
Building high performance computer systems is all about finding and removing bottlenecks. Unfortunately, this is a never ending game. As fast as you identify and deal with one bottleneck, another appears. For a while, the problem was the raw performance of the four key elements in a computer system; processor, memory, network and storage. Over [...]
It's that time again, the time that most observers in the industry say will never happen. IBM is releasing the next generation of its z Systems mainframe products called the z14. IBM has seen an acceleration of sales across its z Systems business unit helped, in part, by the LinuxONE models. With z14, IBM will [...]
Two months ago at DockerCon 17, IBM announced it was to make Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) available for Linux on IBM z Systems. This was an announcement that IBM had widely trailed having talking about multiple container technologies and the mainframe for some time. What was different this time was the detail around the announcement. [...]
When VMware launched its vCloud Initiative at the 2008 VMworld conference it looked like it was going to move into and dominate the nascent cloud market as it had done the virtualisation space. It took five years, however for VMware to move from announcement to production. In that time, VMware had missed the boat and [...]
