Clarification on IBM's Power Systems Withdrawals

Published: June 1, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, I did a short story on some processor cards, processor activations, disk drives, and other features that IBM has withdrawn from its product catalog as part of the April 28 announcements. That withdrawal announcement--which you can read all the details about here and which I analyzed in Older Power Iron Starts Heading for the Dustbin--has caused some confusion.

Jim Herring, the director of high-end Power Systems at IBM's Systems and Technology Group, who you will remember as managing several generations of iSeries and System i product launches before the convergence of the i and p lines into Power Systems, got on the horn and clarified something that was not made clear in the announcement letter. While IBM will indeed stop selling 4.2 GHz Power6 processor boards and processor activations for them inside the original Power 570 servers, and IBM stopped selling 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) on April 28, and while it will also stop selling processor upgrades for 9406-525, 9406-550, and 9407-515 machines as of November 27, these withdrawals from marketing are for new machines only.

Processor activations are not, I repeat are not, withdrawn for existing machines you have on site with latent processor cores inside the box. "Even for withdrawn products, we have a way to activate latent processors," explained Herring. "We actually do a very tidy business activating processors on older machines." Basically, any box that has capacity-on-demand features and latent capacity sitting on your site--even old iSeries 8XX boxes--can have that capacity turned on.

Herring added that on the 520-class machines using Power5 processors, IBM is killing off upgrades, but the announcement letter did not say that at the same time Big Blue was making upgrade paths available from these boxes to Power6-based Power 520 boxes.

Both IT Jungle and IBM are sorry for any confusion we may have caused.

RELATED STORIES

Older Power Iron Starts Heading for the Dustbin

Sundry Spring Power Systems Storage Enhancements

Power Systems Finally Get Solid State Disks

New Power6+ Iron: The Feeds and Speeds

IBM Launches Power6+ Servers--Again

IBM Adds New SAS, SSD Disks to Servers

Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

Various System i and Power Systems i Nips and Tucks

Power Systems Memory Prices Slashed to Promote Virtualization

Sundry July Power Systems Announcements

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot