More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too
March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.
In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features for pretty old machines in a lot of cases, and it is no surprise that Big Blue wants to write all this stuff off and move on. The weird thing, if you think about it, is that the announcement date and the withdrawal date are the same day, which means you technically don’t have a chance to make a last minute offer for some of these features. Which seems unnecessarily mean. You would think that IBM would announce these feature withdrawals three or six months ago and give people a chance to review the long list and see if they need any of this stuff.
Go figure.
Similar problem with the Red Hat on Power withdrawal that came out on February 10 in announcement letter AD26-0061. In that announcement, IBM is killing off three-year and five-year subscriptions for various Red Hat products that are compiled for Power-based platforms. These are being replaced with one-year subscriptions. What’s the big deal? Well, five-year and three-year subscriptions have discounts compared to one-year subscriptions, and what this amounts to, then, is a price increase on these various Red Hat on Power software stacks.
The affected products include:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power with 3-year Subscription (5639-3RE)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power with 5-year Subscription (5639-5RE)
IBM is also withdrawing selected features from the following products:
- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for Power (5639-OCP)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions for Power LE (5639-RHS)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for Power (5639-RH8)
You will have to take a look at these to see if they affect you.
And finally, IBM is giving the end of support for two Red Hat programs, which will have their support discontinued on March 10, 2029. They are:
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for Power 2.0.0 3-Year (5369-AC3)
- Red Hat Ansible Automation for Power 2.0.0 3 Year Offering (5639-AN3)
These are also being replaced with products with an annual subscription with no discounts.
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