Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Drilling Down Into The New Power9 Entry Servers
February 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last Wednesday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you a high-level overview of the six new Power9 entry servers, code-named “ZZ” by IBM, as well as an initial pass on the changes that came with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. If you haven’t read these, please do, because they give you information on IBM’s strategy with regard to the Power9 iron and the IBM i platform.
In this issue, we are going to drill down into the six new Power9 systems, taking particular care with the single-socket Power S914 and dual-socket Power …
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At Long Last, IBM i Finally Gets Power9
February 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The most important part of the Power9 rollout for the vast majority of IBM i customers has finally happened: Big Blue has lifted the veil on the Power9-based “ZZ” systems that we have been hearing about for a few months now and that are being delivered in the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 servers.
These are three of the six machines based on the ZZ design, and they are the only ones that can IBM i without any restrictions. Two other machines, which are called the Power H922 and Power H924, were created explicitly to run SAP’s HANA …
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IBM Preps Power9 “ZZ” Systems For Imminent Launch
February 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In last Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, I told you that the market was getting restless for the rollout of the mainstream servers based on the Power9 processor, and Jenny Thomas, our publisher, commented on our @ITJungleNews Twitter feed that it was also me that was getting restless. Indeed, I am. My iron level is getting low, I suppose.
Well, the good news for both you and me is that the “ZZ” variants of the Power Systems platforms, which we talked about last week based on the chatter we have been hearing, are coming sooner rather than later. …
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IBM Readies Mainstream Power9 Iron For Launch
February 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The natives are getting restless, as my parents used to say when we were getting hungry. And the IBM i and AIX bases are definitely getting restless to know what Power9 iron that will be able to run Big Blue’s own operating systems in conjunction with the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor. They also want to know if IBM is going to give customers a big improvement in price/performance compared to Power7+ and Power8 machines that are still widely available in the channel.
In short, they want to plan their future, and after four years of waiting, it is time.
IBM …
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The Persistence Of The IBM i Platform
February 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Talking about switching platforms is one thing, and it is relatively easy if you are talking about moving from Unix infrastructure servers based on RISC servers to machines that are going to run essentially the same workloads on Linux systems based on X86 processors. Leaving the IBM i fold, particularly for customers who have created their own applications, is another matter entirely.
That, in a nutshell, is one of the main reasons why the IBM i platform, in its many different incarnations in the past 30 years, has persisted. The database is the stickiest piece of software in the datacenter, …
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IBM Winds Down Yet More Older Power Systems Features
January 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is amazing to me that IBM stops selling specific Power Systems and features in such a gradual and what looks like a haphazard fashion. It seems to take forever to kill off older product lines. It may be more a function of what supplies Big Blue has in the barn than with some kind of orderly, sensible withdrawal from marketing of prior generations of gear.
The upshot is that it is very hard to figure out what IBM is and is not selling, and when it will stop selling particular features. And because IBM does not usually provide the …
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The IBM i Base Is Ready To Move On Up
January 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Even the most eager hyperscaler or cloud builder in the world has to let a server sit in place, running workloads, for at least three years to get good value on the dollar spent, and in many cases, machines are repurposed to be in the fleet for longer than that. And no company can accept the risk of changing all machines at the same time, for obvious reasons other than cost, because such a change could be very disruptive to any business. Enterprises tend to have less spare iron and fewer techies, and so they are even more conservative, and …
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IBM’s Systems Group On The Financial Rebound
January 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We like to start with the good news here in 2018, and the good news is that IBM had a very good quarter in its systems business, so we can all start breathing a little easier and Hitachi can put that checkbook away because Big Blue ain’t going to be selling off its System z and Power Systems business any time soon.
(We are joking there. We think. . . . and hope.)
In the final quarter of 2017 ended in December, the mainframe saw sales shoot up 71 percent thanks to the System z14 refresh that started in …
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Update On The Spectre And Meltdown Patches For Power
January 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When it comes to the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities that hit as the new year was getting going, the important word to ponder is “mitigated.” Everyone is talking about mitigating the issue, but no one is using the word “fixed.” As we discussed last week, one of the two types of Spectre vulnerabilities – the Variant 2 known as branch target injection – is particularly tricky to hack and to fix, so IT vendors are choosing their words very carefully.
The odds were that unintended consequences for such a low-level fix will occur, so you can …
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Power Systems And The Spectre And Meltdown Threats
January 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Speculative execution is something that has been part of modern processors for well over a decade, and while it is hard to quantify how much of a performance benefit this collection of techniques have delivered, it is obviously significant enough that all CPUs, including IBM Power and System z chips, have them. And that, as the new Spectre and Meltdown security holes that were announced by Google on January 3 show, turns out to be a big problem.
Without getting too deep into the technical details, there are many different ways to implement speculative execution, which is used to …
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