Reminder: SCSI Disks Coming to the End of the Line
August 17, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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I know that I have said this a few times in the past year in various stories The Four Hundred has done about nips and tucks in the Power Systems lineup, but SCSI disks for Power Systems and their predecessors are coming to the end of the line. Like soon. Like next week, in fact. So if you have SCSI disks in your machines and you want to stick with that technology instead of moving to internal SAS drives and or enclosures that support SAS drives, you don’t have very long to buy SCSI disks from Big Blue. As you can see from the IBM i storage solutions statement available here, IBM has been transitioning from SCSI to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives for the past two years, and starting this year, in fact, the 141 GB 15K RPM SCSI disks have been the only SCSI drives available for the i 6.1 and i5/OS V5R4 operating systems. August 28 is the final sales date for these 141 GB disks. Now, if you have SCSI drives in your systems, obviously they will continue to be supported by current and future operating systems and tech support will be available for SCSI drives out beyond 2010, according to the IBM note on the matter. It is not clear what IBM will do in the event that someone has bought new SCSI disks and is still in the warranty period and something goes wrong with drives that are covered by the warranty. Presumably, Big Blue has a stock of SCSI drives in a warehouse. Used equipment dealers and resellers of new kit will, of course, have some disks in stock long after IBM runs out. SAS and SATA are the waves of the current when it comes to disk storage, and that is just the way it is. RELATED STORIES IBM Sunsets More Power Systems Features Clarification on IBM’s Power Systems Withdrawals 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
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