Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA
November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
(Sponsored Content) It is a truth in this world that you get what you pay for, and it is absolutely true for the systems that companies buy to support SAP’s HANA in-memory database and their applications for data warehousing and online transaction processing.
It is no secret to the Power Systems faithful that IBM’s Power architecture has consistently offered reliability, availability, and serviceability features in both the processor and the system architecture that are superior to X86 alternatives. And the Power Systems platform also offers superior compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth benefits on top of that, …
Read more -
IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11
November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.
When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …
Read more -
Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i
November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM i shops that use the Virtual I/O Server, which is a cut-down version of the AIX implementation of Unix created by Big Blue, have to be aware that there is a security vulnerability that affects recent releases of AIX and VIOS.
The vulnerability, announced in Security Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788, affects Power9 machinery running VIOS 3.1 or AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2, and under what are called “extenuating circumstances” the vulnerability could allow a local user on the system to obtain sensitive information stored on the L1 cache on the Power9 cores.
The vulnerability was reported on November 18, and …
Read more -
Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support
November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We don’t get surprises very often in the Power Systems market, and even fewer in the IBM i sub-market. But last week, we did get a surprise – and it was a pleasant one – as Big Blue decided that it was going to allow for IBM i 7.1, which has long since been removed from marketing and which was just recently given extended extended support through April 2023, to run on selected models of the Power Systems line using Power9 processors.
That IBM would allow for this is remarkable, and it shows the economic and technical difficulties that many …
Read more -
IBM Keeps OpenShift Up To Speed On Power Systems
November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
For more than two years now, as we have previously reported, there have been a number of ways to bring Kubernetes container control to the Power Systems platform, including Docker Enterprise Edition, IBM Cloud Private, and Red Hat OpenShift. In the wake of the Red Hat acquisition, it is pretty clear that OpenShift will be the container environment of choice on IBM System z and Power Systems machines on premises and on these machines as well as X86 iron deployed on the IBM Cloud.
To that end, we find in announcement letter 220-439 that IBM’s Red Hat unit has …
Read more -
How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?
November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.
Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …
Read more -
You Can Save Money And Get More Performance At The Same Time
November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
(Sponsored Content) A few weeks ago, we had a chat with John Richards, vice president of Global Asset Recovery Services, the part of IBM that sells certified pre-owned Power Systems, IBM Z and data storage, as well as parts and features, for these devices and is arguably the largest supplier of such equipment in the market. We talked very generally about the differences between the used (sometimes called second-hand) and certified pre-owned (often abbreviated to CPO) markets for Power Systems, and how this market has changed over time, but still can provide significant value to customers …
Read more -
Cloud Walkers Updates IBM i Partition Manager, Slashes Prices
November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
All over the world, a lot of things are taking a bit longer to get done these days thanks to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But things are still getting done, and that is the main thing. So it is with Bartlomiej Grabowski, the founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Walkers, the startup based in Prague in the Czech Republic who released a tool called LPARKit, which we covered at its V1 release back in December 2019.
The plan, Grabowski tells The Four Hundred, was to take all of the input from the V1 users …
Read more -
IBM Pulls The Plug On First Pass Power9 Entry Machines
November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
This is probably not a big deal to a lot of IBM i shops, but it might matter to service providers or enterprises with multiple machines that have been qualified by testing people, and to software vendors that need to certify their software on specific hardware platforms. And so we bring it up.
The it we are talking about is in announcement letter 920-152, and it is the withdrawal of the original entry Power9 systems lineup, which IBM often calls the “scale out” machines because they are intended to be used for distributed computing clusters. But one company’s node …
Read more -
IBM i Turns In Good Numbers For Q3, Bolstering Power Systems
October 26, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Historically speaking, the Power Systems division, now the Cognitive Systems division officially within IBM, has its worst period of sales in the first quarter of any year and its second worst 13-week revenue run in the third quarter of any year. And true to form, the third quarter of 2020 was not a great one for sales of Power iron, according to our model. That model is derived from IBM’s financial results and other data, and we update it every quarter when Big Blue reports to Wall Street.
Thanks to the fact that the Power9 generation of machines is entering …
Read more