A Few More Power Systems Announcements Before Year End

November 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We don’t expect a lot of announcements from IBM at this point in the year relating to the Power Systems platform, and in fact, we don’t expect a lot of announcements from Big Blue at all. Except maybe for the usual end-of-year “workload rebalancing,” the 2025 edition of that we saw recently being reported in the Wall Street Journal with very little details.

Here is a weird one. In announcement letter AD25-1276, IBM is reselling an AMD W6499 graphics card, which is based on its RDNA 2 architecture and which has 4 GB of GDDR6 frame buffer memory, for the Power S1012 and for the scale out variants of the Power11 systems announced in July. (Meaning all of the machines not including the Power E1150 and Power E1180 systems.) This will be available on December 12. On November 11, IBM delivered a new set of power distribution unit (PDU) mounting hardware for Power Systems machinery, which was vaguely described in this letter.

On November 11 in announcement letter AD25-1533, IBM withdrew a bunch of hardware features from the Power Systems lineup. One of the weird things in this announcement was the removal of the option to manufacture some Power Systems iron in the United States, presumably to meet the requirements of Made in the USA provisions. A whole bunch of PCI-Express 4.0 Ethernet adapters that support 1 Gb/sec, 10 Gb/sec, and 25 Gb/sec ports, and a bunch of power supplies and the backplane for 10 NVM-Express devices was also mothballed.

In announcement letter AD25-1300, also on November 11, IBM is updating a bunch of features for the PowerVM hypervisor. On December 5, PowerVM VIOS 4.1.2 and PowerVM Novalink 2.3.2 will be available, and on December 12, PowerVM Hypervisor FW1110.10 comes out. IBM is also updating the Power-native OpenStack cloud controller, PowerVC for Private Cloud, to the 2.3.2 release, coming out on December 5. The Hardware Management Console (HMC) running on Power and the virtual HMC (vHMC) get updated to the 11.1.1111 release and Cloud Management Console (CMC) gets advanced to the 1.24 release also on December 12. The biggest change is that PowerVC now has a RHEL instance bundled into it, so you don’t have to bring your own license to an LPAR running PowerVC. There are a lot of little changes, of course, which are detailed in the announcement letter.

Announcement letter AD25-1423 outlines how Big Blue is taking a subset of its IBM Concert AIOps application management tools and wrapping it up for the Power Systems platforms specifically. IBM Concert Subscription for Power does the following:

Collect IBM Power inventory from connected Power HMCs using discovery workflows
Ingest and assess IBM vulnerability advisories for Power
Prioritize and schedule remediation actions
Review, approve, and track maintenance progress

IBM Concert Subscription for Power runs on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and ironically can be deployed on an X86 server or a Power server. It will be available on November 21.

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