IBM Kills Off JS22 Blade Server in January, Old Disks in April

Published: November 15, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If for some reason you want to buy IBM's old Power6-based JS22 blade servers for your Blade Center chassis, you'd better hurry up.

Big Blue says in announcement letter 910-198 that on January 7, 2011, it will cease peddling the JS22 blade. That machine, announced in November 2007, was a two-socket blade based on IBM's dual-core Power6 processors running at 4 GHz. (Technically, it is product number 7998-61X in the IBM catalog.) The JS22 was over priced and not well matched to the needs of a lot of i5/OS and now IBM i shops, but that doesn't mean that customers didn't buy them or that they might not want to use them rather than newer Power6+ or Power7 blades in their BladeCenter machines. They can support IBM i 6.1, 6.1.1, or 7.1.

Then again, considering how expensive the JS22 will still be unless IBM wants to sell you one for 50 percent off or more, it is perfectly silly to buy this ancient blade server. The current PS700 blade server, which comes with four 3 GHz Power7 cores in a single socket, is rated at 21,100 on the Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) that IBM uses to gauge the relative performance of AS/400 and i boxes. The JS22 supports half as much memory (at 32 GB) and is rated at only 13,800 CPWs. Unless you have some ancient V5R4 workloads that you just can't move to new iron, it is best to say good riddance to the JS22. And even if you do, maybe it is time to think about program conversion.

Also on January 7, IBM is putting the 7042-CR5 Hypervisor Mangling Computer, er, Hardware Management Controller, out in the cold for the long, long winter. Old 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel disk controller adapters for Power Systems machines in the Power5 and Power5+ lineup are also being put on ice, as are the PCI-X iSCSI HBA adapters for these machines.

On April 29, 2011, 69.7 GB and 73.4 GB SAS disk drives spinning at 15K RPM for Power6 and Power6+ machines will be withdrawn from marketing. Selected PCI-based quad-port modems are also going the way of all flesh.

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