Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops
August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.
In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series of over 200 “megaport” points of presence around the globe that Big Blue maintains. This became available on June 30, and this is one of the shortest announcements we have ever seen from IBM, and it is obviously also a means to connect private datacenter gear to IBM Cloud services as well as to SaaS and IaaS services from other cloud providers. At the moment, this seems to be only available in the United States and its territories.
In announcement letter 221-127, we find that IBM has upgraded the Host Integration Solution for Multiplatforms and the Host Integration Solution for 5250 Applications to their 9.7 releases. This updated software became available on July 29. For those of you who can’t keep track of these bundles, Host Integration Solution for Multiplatforms consists Host Access Transform Services (HATS) 9.7, Personal Communications 14, and Host On-Demand 14 and supports Communications Server for Data Center Deployment 7.1, WebSphere Application Server 9.0.5, and Rational Application Developer 9.7. And apparently so does Host Integration Solution for 5250 Applications, but it also has the added prerequisite that Rational Developer for i 9.6 is requires to create applications using HATS. IBM has made a lot of tweaks to HATS so it supports RESTful services and has an enhanced REST API, and is also supported on macOS now, too.
Here’s a funny one. In announcement letter 121-067, the Power E980, Power E950, Power S924, Power S914, Power S922, Power H924, and Power H922 servers now can have a 1 Gb/sec Base-T Ethernet transceiver. Yup, in a world where 100 Gb/sec Ethernet is increasingly the norm, and the 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec upgrade cycle is finally starting, IBM is delivering 1 Gb/sec networking for what we presume is a pretty obscure – and possibly system management – use case. This adapter plugs into the SFP28 port of the feature #EC2U or feature #EC2T adapters, and both ports can be downgraded to this lower speed.
Thank heavens new Power10 systems will be announced soon.
