Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support
April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.
In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …
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Pay Attention To JDK And WebSphere Release Support
April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM i shops don’t have to use Big Blue’s WebSphere Application Server middleware to create Java, since some of the Java functions are built into the Apache Web server built into the operating system and open source programs like the Tomcat server, while not still supported, are nonetheless sometimes still used. Still other shops don’t go for the full-on WebSphere Application Server, but use the Express Edition that is bundled on the machine to provide a certain level of automation for Java workloads.
IBM has been warning customers that they have to keep current on Java Development Kit (JDK) releases, …
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The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth
March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.
And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …
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IBM Will Change WebSphere To Work In A Cloudy World
March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you had to pick one product that put IBM back on the map in software, it would have to be the WebSphere Application Server that was wrapped around the Apache Web server for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. That was back when Big Blue was the technology sponsor for the Olympics, and it used the summer and winter events, each held every four years and out of phase by two years, as a showcase for new technologies. Two years is a Moore’s Law gap, so it worked out nicely.
WebSphere was the pet project of Tom Rosamilia, …
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Bang For The Buck On Power9 Entry Hardware
March 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When it comes right down to it, there are three things that drive a server upgrade or new system purchase among IBM midrange shops: They have an aging system that has to be replaced, workloads are expanding and driving new capacity, or new workloads are being added to the system. In many cases, the situation involves two or even all three of these factors. But what gets the deal done is the value that the new system brings above and beyond satisfying those needs. You have to get a good deal so everyone looks like a hero.
The good news …
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Sundry Power Systems Announcements, Here And There
March 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The big Power Systems announcements came out in February, but IBM always has some things that need to get done. And last week, it wrapped up a few loose ends with some nips and tucks in the product line.
In announcement letter 118-030, we learned all about them. First off, IBM has expanded the storage capacity of the Power-based CS822 servers, which are special version of the Power S822 based on Power8 chips that are designed to support the hyperconverged storage stack from Nutanix. We told you all about the CS821 and CS822 servers for running the Nutanix Enterprise …
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The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown
March 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been waiting to see what impact on performance the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution patches, which plug some security vulnerability holes that search engine giant Google discovered last summer and made public in early January, would have on Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system.
Now that Big Blue has published the first edition of the Power Systems Performance Report that includes the new “ZZ” Power 9-based systems, we not only get a sense of the relative performance of the “Nimbus” Power9 chip for entry servers. We also can figure out the performance impact of the …
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The Deal On Power9 Memory For Entry Servers
March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a lot of changes that come with any new Power Systems platform. But perhaps the biggest change – and one that will in some ways make the Power9 platform more competitive with X86 and ARM servers and in others less competitive – is the way IBM is shifting from buffered DDR3 and DDR4 main memory used in Power8 iron to plain vanilla registered DDR4 memory that is commonly used in all servers these days.
Buffered memory had its heyday on high-end NUMA systems, and was necessary to try to balance the needs of memory bandwidth against ever-increasing compute …
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Cognitive Systems Hardware Business Gets A Boost
March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As 2017 came to an end, X86 server shipments and revenues surged, and IBM’s System z14 mainframes came to market and Big Blue got a much-needed injection of revenues and profits in its Cognitive Systems hardware business.
While IBM did start shipping some initial Power9 iron as the year came to an end, shipments are not going to start in earnest until March, when the “ZZ” entry Power Systems machines announced in February start shipping. In the quarter, and more or less consistent with what IBM said recently in its own financial reports, IDC believes that Big Blue had $2.69 …
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Inside IBM’s Power S924 Power9 Entry System
February 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is hard to say for sure, but the two most popular Power9 machines that IBM will sell in the current and coming years will probably be the single-socket Power S914 or the two-socket Power S924. A lot depends on performance, which we don’t have metrics for yet, but one of these machines is going to be the volume leader – unless they are neck and neck.
We flipped a coin to decide which machine to cover first, and heads was the Power S914 and tails was the Power S924, and the quarter showed the American eagle and not George …
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