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IBM announces Telum II – the processor for its next generation mainframe

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IBM is expected to launch the replacement to its current z16 range of servers in 2025. Our first glimpse of the its next mainframe line came with its announcement of the Telum II processor at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto in August this year (mirroring its announcement of the original Telum processor in at the same conference in September 2021, seven months ahead of its introduction of the z16 itself in April 2022). In this post I’ll look at how the technical advancements of the new chip will stretch the lead IBM has over other server vendors even further. Read more »

IBM introduces Power Virtual Server as an on-premise pod cloud option


To maximize sales server vendors want to make their products available to customers in multiple ways. In terms of the way they are acquired, this means outright purchase, leases and pay-per-use schema. In terms of what you buy, this means Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings in addition to physical servers themselves. IBM is later than its competitors in deciding to make its Power servers available as an on-premise cloud offerings – akin to HPE’s Greenlake, in the market since 2018 , AWS Outposts, which were launched at the end of 2019 and Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer launched in August 2023. In this post I’ll look at what IBM’s move and its consequences. Read more »

Raw storage spending soars by 54% in Q2 2024 – the recovery continues


I predicted a return to growth for the raw storage market back in April. Although very few of the disk drives, flash and memory components are bought by end-users, they are nevertheless essential components of laptops, desktops, smart phones, tablets, storage systems servers and other devices, making this market vitally important to our industry. In the second quarter if the year sales grew a massive 54% to $50 billion in total. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) sales grew 35% to $7.1b, NAND – by 66% to $12.3b – and DRAM, by 56% to $30.6B. In this post I’ll share my capacity and spending forecasts for coming quarters and years. As always, please contact me if you need greater details for your business planning purposes. Read more »

ITC spending reaches $1.865 trillion in Q2 2024 – the highest ever total


It may seem a long time ago, but it takes time to assess market movements. In this post I’ll pass on our findings about the size and growth of the ITC market in the second quarter (April to June) 2024. Read more »

Cloud computing – omnes nimbi divisa sunt in partes tres


I first wrote about the importance of cloud computing at the end of 2009. Since then I’ve documented its rise in 844 posts published on this site. Of course its services have become a huge component of enterprise IT. However 2023 was a pivotal year in which total sales declined for the first time – dropping 12% from $465b to $410b. Sales picked up again in Q1 2024, so it’s a great time to reappraise these services as part of the overall IT market.
The overall market is divided into three categories (to mis-quote Julius Caesar, ‘omnes nimbi divisa sunt in partes tres’). Read more »

EMEA suppliers fail to take advantage the – no longer global – network market.


Physical networking is an essential element of both the Communications and IT markets infrastructure, as well as a key part of the long-term and continuing convergence between the two. Read more »

Crowdstrike… quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Roman satirist Juvenal included the line ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ in a poem (Satire VI, lines 347–348), which translates as ‘who guards the guardians?’ While this has been used in recent times to criticise dictatorial governments, it is equally a question we should ask about anti-virus software companies.
Last week Crowdstrike posted a regular update for its enterprise customers’ IT staff to install on around 8.5 million* (according to Microsoft) Windows PCs and client devices. Unfortunately a bug in the software, described by Crowdstrike as a ‘defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts’, caused all of these machines to crash, leaving their users with a ‘blue screen of death’. Read more »

The ITC market in first quarter 2024 – moving on up


As the year goes on my smile gets wider. The positive signs at the end of last year turned into measurable growth in the first quarter of 2024, as my Figure above suggests. My research process for the period complete, I want to share my findings on the spending/revenue and net profit changes and some opinions on what they mean.
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Server market 2023 – a virtualized, x86, Windows driven world


The broad-brush shape of the server market was drawn up many years ago:

  • x86 processors took over from vendor-designed (and sometimes manufactured) RISC ones, which themselves had overtaken CISC types;
  • Microsoft’s Windows operating system took over from vendor specific Unix variants tied to their dedicated RISC processors;
  • Dell EMC overtook HPE as the world’s largest server vendor in 2017; IBM’s revenues declined as a result of its decision to exit the x86 server market in 2014;
  • The proportion of servers that are virtualized (i.e. able to run multiple operating sessions simultaneously) increased dramatically once Vmware had produced viable virtualization solutions for x86 servers from 2003 onwards.

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IBM’s new FlashCore Module 4 – ransomware attack detection cut from minutes to seconds

In February IBM announced an upgraded FlashCore Module (FCM) – FCM4 now includes features to prevent and/or recover quickly from ransomware attack, following last year’s announcement that its storage controllers could sample I/Os for detection. In the past users have found it very hard to protect block storage devices, which is one reason why so many large organizations have fallen victim to serious ransomware attacks. Read more »

The raw storage market returns to growth… will it be ‘exponential’?


Raw storage (hard disk drives, NAND flash and DRAM memory components) is an essential and intriguing market. Like a ducks legs under water these parts work really hard to keep the ITC market moving – they are not top of mind for most end-users. They are mostly bought by only the very largest organizations, most of whom are suppliers, integrators of distributors. Computers, tablets, phones, cloud services and IoT devices cannot work without them. They are so important that they are also victim to large government legislation restricting the countries to which they can be sold. Read more »

ITC regional and category forecasts – the small growth of a massive, but disaggregating, market


In this post I summarize my findings to Q4 2023 and provide forecasts to 2025 for the ITC market by offering category and region. Overall there’s been good growth in spending since the on-set of the COVID-19 pandemic in Q2 2020 and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022; worldwide market growth was 10% in 2021, but just 1% and 2% in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
It is an everlasting problem for IT market researchers that we h Read more »