Plug Gets Pulled on System i 570 and 595 CPU Card Sales

March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM has scheduled to withdraw the remaining Power6 and Power6+ machines that it had been selling from its catalog throughout the remainder of this year, with machines getting the axe in late April, May, or July, depending on the box. Now, some important features for these machines are also getting the chop.

The machines that IBM killed off in late January were the Power 520, Power 550, and Power 595, which should come as no surprise to anyone. The BladeCenter JS23 and JS43 blades servers also got taken out behind the woodshed. You can read the details in announcement letter 911-010.

Last week, in announcement letter 911-048, Big Blue said that effective July 29, a whole bunch of features for earlier Power Systems iron would no longer be available for sale. This includes the 1.65 GHz Power5 and 2.2 GHz Power5+ processors for the System i 570 and the 1.65 GHz Power5 and 2.3 GHz Power5+ processors for the System i 595. So if you were thinking you would be able to just add processors to your existing machines for the foreseeable future, the future just got shorter.

In the announcement, the modem cables used across prior iSeries and System i lines is also being removed from the catalog, and so are various DDR2 memory cards and the memory sticks that plug into them for small, medium, and large Power5 and Power5+ systems, which came with System i and System p brands, you will remember. Various other power cables, rack adapters, I/O risers and kits, and power supplies will also no longer be available after July 29.

These items will be available on the secondhand equipment market, including IBM Global Financing, for some time after this, of course.

And a reminder: Just because IBM will not sell a new processor for those old Power5 and Power5+ machines after July 29, if you have latent processor cards and cores in your System i 570 or 595 box, you can always pay to activate them and install IBM i, AIX, or Linux on those processors. It may make sense–if you don’t think you will need to upgrade your system for a year or two–to get a few extra cores to throw at work while IBM and its resellers are still selling them. Then you won’t get caught short and have to do a full system upgrade to add capacity at some point this year or next, giving IBM the negotiating leverage.