A Few More Power Systems Updates Before 2022 Ends

November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a pretty eventful 2022 for the Power Systems line, and Big Blue has a few ends to tie up before the year comes to a close. And that means we have a few more things to tell you here and there.

First up, there is a new feature on the high-end “Denali” Power E1080 server announced last September as the first member of the Power10 family of systems that lets customers mix OMI differential DIMM (DDIMM) memory sticks of different capacities on the Power10 single chip module (SCM) that is at the heart of the system.

When the Power E1080 was first launched, IBM had DDIMM memory sticks in 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB capacities, with 256 GB DDIMM memory sticks coming later in the year. Each Power E1080 memory feature card can hold four of these DDIMM memory sticks, and thus the capacity of the feature cards comes to 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB. A single SCM socket has sixteen memory slots and therefore can address a maximum of 16 TB of capacity, and the full four-node Power E1080 has 240 cores active (out of 256 on the Power10 SCMs) and a maximum of 64 TB of memory.

You might be thinking that customers are nowhere needing to have the full addressability of that 64 TB of main memory, but with very large relational databases and some very large SAP HANA installations as well, apparently this is not the case. We infer this because IBM is allowing customers to mix memory cards using the 128 GB memory sticks that were initially available on the machine with the 256 GB memory sticks that were available earlier this year. If customers didn’t need the fatter memory, they would be asking IBM to allow them to mix the fattest Power10 OMI memory features with the penultimate capacity Power10 OMI memory features. Customers would just add more of the 512 GB memory features to their existing machines. The fact that IBM is allowing the mixing of memory on the Power10 sockets means customers want even more memory than this would allow.

According to announcement letter 122-097, from November 8, the 128 GB and 256 GB memory sticks can be mixed in a 50:50 ratio on each Power10 socket starting December 9. Presumably, IBM will allow the mixing of OMI memory sticks on the Power10 sockets of the rest of the Power Systems lineup of machines based on the Power10 architecture.

We have no clue if there are any performance implications of having mixed capacities on the DDIMMs, but it should not affect bandwidth. It depends on how capacity bound workloads are, but presumably there will be some effect if the capacities on the sticks are not the same. But whatever they are, these effects are probably a lot mess dramatic than having to pull the 128 GB OMI memory out and paying to replace it with 256 GB OMI memory, or having less capacity by expanding with only 128 GB OMI memory.

In a separate tweak, which you can see in announcement letter 122-131, the IBM Private Cloud Solution, which is a utility-priced, on-premises cluster of Power iron all glued together by the Enterprise Pool 2.0 capacity pooling for PowerVM partitions and managed by the Cloud Management Console (CMC), is getting its capacity stretched.

Specifically, the maximum number of systems in an Enterprise Pool, and that the CMC can see, is boosted by 33 percent to 64 machines, up from 48 when the 2.0 release of IBM’s capacity pooling was announced last year. The number of logical partitions that can be managed in the Enterprise Pool has been doubled to 4,000 partitions, and the setup now allows for up to 1,000 partitions in the pool to be managed by a single Hardware Management Console (HMC).

And in an indication of how big Power Systems customers are using these pooled machines, the CMC has been enhanced so that partitions running the Red Hat CoreOS Linux variant – which is distinct from the regular Red Hat Enterprise Linux and which underpins the OpenShift Container Platform commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container controller – can now keep the aggregated minutes of CoreOS processing on the Enterprise Pool kept separate from other base capacity or metered capacity charges.

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