Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates
October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.
But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw a bunch of these in announcement letter AD24-0500, which came out on October 8. Let’s go through it.
First, the latest enterprise-class NVM-Express U.2 flash drives that were already rolled out for the rest of the Power10 platform, which comes in 1.6 TB and 3.2 TB capacities, are now available for that Bonnell Power S1012 server, with versions formatted for either IBM i or AIX/Linux platforms. The new drives are rated at three drive writes per day over five years with random read/write workloads.
IBM is also making available a legacy PCI-Express 3.0 low-profile SAS tape adapter available on the Power S1012. This is a big deal for customers who have legacy LTO-5 and LTO-6 tape drives and probably hundreds of cartridges of snapshots of their data and applications vaulted. This feature #ES31 tape adapter can support up to four tape drives on its four 6 Gb/sec ports. The same electronics in the existing feature #ES30 SAS tape adapter for prior Power10 and Power9 systems are used in the feature #ES31 tape adapter. The tape adapter for the Power S1012 server supports external SAS LTO-5, LTO-6, LTO-7, and LTO-8 tape drives used in the 7226-1U3 Multimedia drawers, tape units such as the TS2250, TS2260, TS2270, and TS2280, and single external tape drives such as the TS2900, TS3100, TS3200, and TS3310.
There were some other tweaks to the Power S1012. Now, there is a Solution Edition of the Power S1012 that comes with the 1-core IBM i variant of the hardware as well as a Solution Edition for the Power S1012 and Power S1014 that supports the 4-core IBM i version. The Solution Editions are hardware bundles that often have cheaper prices and bundled services and training as well as lower-priced subscription fees for selected IBM i stack components.
In addition to that, IBM is chasing the healthcare market specifically with the Power S1012 and Power S1014 servers and is offering a special memory bundle for Solution Editions that gives customers running healthcare operational databases (ODBs) on Power S1014 servers 2 TB for the price of 1 TB. IBM warns that this special memory boost is not available for healthcare enterprise cache protocol (ECP) applications. For ECP applications, IBM is offering 1 TB of memory for the price of 512 GB on the Power S1012 and Power S1022 Solution Edition bundles.
At the higher end of the Power10 line, IBM is now supporting additional expansion drawers on the four-way Power E1050 and the eight-way and 16-way Power E1080 servers. IBM said this was coming back in announcement letter AS24-0605 on August 13, but it has expanded its expansion, so to speak. The Power E1050 and Power E1080 servers as they were announced years ago were maxxed out at three feature #ENZ0 PCI-Express 4.0 expansion drawers per server for storage and I/O. These I/O drawers plug into a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 slot in the servers. (You can plug them into PCI-Express 5.0 x8 slots as well, but they will run at half speed. Back on August 13, IBM boosted the maximum number of feature #ENZO I/O expansion drawers per machine to four, increasing I/O bandwidth and capacity by 33 percent, which is a good thing.
With last week’s revelation in announcement letter AD24-0500, the number of feature #ESR0 NED24 NVM-Express expansion drawers is also boosted to four instead of three on the Power E1080 server, and customers can mix and match the regular I/O and NVM-Express I/O drawers within that maximum of four drawers. To be super precise, you can have one feature #ESR0 NVM-Express drawer with up to three feature #ENZ0 drawers or you can have two feature #ESR0 NVM-Express drawers with up to two feature #ENZ0 drawers. You can still do four of the feature #ENZO drawers all by their lonesome if you want, too.
For the Power E1050, the mix is a bit different. You can do a maximum of four feature #ENZ0 plain vanilla I/O drawers, and you can also have one feature #ESR0 NVM-Express drawer with up to three feature #ENZ0 drawers. But if you want two feature #ESR0 NVM-Express drawers, you can only have one additional feature #ENZ0 drawers. So you are still maxxed out at three drawers. The Power E1050 does not have enough I/O bandwidth to handle all of that flash and then other I/O on top of it, apparently.
And finally, Power Enterprise Pools 2.0, which is a means to share processor core activations across a pool of Power9 and Power10 machinery and to move IBM i, AIX, and Linux licenses around the cores as they are activated on one machine and deactivated on another, has been expanded to allow up to 96 unique physical servers in a single pool. Power Enterprise Pools. The pool was originally 16 unique systems with a maximum of 500 logical partitions per pool with a single Hardware Management Console (HMC), but with multiple HMCs and firmware upgrades on them, that was expanded to 48 systems per pool, 1,000 per HMC, and 2,000 logical partitions per pool. Presumably with the Power Enterprise Pools update, the number of HMCs and the number of LPARs has also been doubled to match the increase in systems in the pool.
In addition to the cluster expansion, Power Enterprise Pools can now auto-detect PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX and IBM i usage in VMs, enabling PowerHA as a base and metered capacity resource without administrators having to manually tag each VM using PowerHA software. The pooling software can also issue warning notifications for expiring software subscriptions of operating system and licensed programs being monitored as shared utility capacity software, and can export per minute data metrics for up to a 24 hour period for system monitoring tools.
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