More Vintage Power Systems Feature Withdrawals

May 19, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

You might be thinking that all of the old iron and peripherals for earlier generations of Power Systems machinery were long since removed by IBM from the product catalog, but there are a lot of components that go into a product line. And last week, IBM cut a few more from the catalog.

In announcement letter 914-128, you will see that a bunch of features for Power Systems iron are going to be withdrawn from marketing effective July 31. There are a bunch of cables and power cords and such that don’t interest customers until they discover they need one, so look at the letter carefully. There are a bunch of memory features for entry and midrange Power Systems in the Power7 generation. Some Ethernet transceivers and adapter cards are also on the chopping block. Memory features for PS7XX blade servers based on the Power7 chips are also getting the cut. And significantly, upgrades from Power 570 machines to the Power 780 and from the Power 770 to the Power 780 are also being removed.

At this point, it might be more illustrative for IBM to tell us what is still available for anything using Power6 or Power6+ chips and when the remainder of the Power7 and Power7+ feature peripheral stack will be cut. It is hard to keep track of all this stuff.