Older Power Iron Starts Heading for the Dustbin

Published: May 18, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With Power6+ systems in the market and Power7 machinery slated for next year, and with IBM's supply chain expert (Bob Moffatt) in charge of its Systems and Technology Group, you can't expect older gear to stay in the product line for very long.

And so it comes as little surprise that IBM is already starting to wind down some Power6 iron. As part of the April 28 announcements, IBM said that starting July 1 it would stop selling 4.2 GHz Power6 processor boards and processor activations for them inside the original Power 570 server announced in the summer of 2007. (That's the 9117-MMA box, you'll remember.) IBM also said that effective April 28, it would stop selling the iSeries Model 810, 825, 870, and 890 machines and a slew of features for these boxes (processor upgrades, disk drives, Ethernet and Token Ring adapters, and so on. (You can read all the details here.)

IBM also said in that announcement letter that processor upgrades within 9405-520, 9406-520, and 9406-570 machines (those are the first generation of Power6 boxes from 2007, before the i-p convergence last April) as well as many features unique to these machines were withdrawn from marketing on April 28. So were SCSI disk drives for these machines. Starting November 27, processor upgrades for 9406-525, 9406-550, and 9407-515 machines will be chopped from the product catalog, and a bunch of features for these machines as well as for the 9407-M15, 9408-M25, and 9409-M50 will be cut, too.

In a separate announcement, IBM said that certain disk, memory, and backplane features of Power 520 and Power 550 machines will be removed from the product line. (These, again, are boxes that were sold prior to the i-p convergence.) IBM is killing off some memory modules used with the JS22 blades, too. And in yet another announcement, a slew of System p features that span the older Power6 line will be withdrawn from marketing as of August 28. The biggies are SCSI disks and SCSI disk controllers. IBM will stop selling 146.8 GB 15K RPM SCSI disks on the Power 595 on November 27.

Basically, IBM is now ready to make the full switch to SAS disks, and is giving i shops fair warning.

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