Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Talking Power9 With IBM Fellow Brad McCredie
October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power8 generation is at the very end of its life, and the Power9 generation is just starting to crawl and soon will be walking and then running. IBM is a bit behind its processor rollout cadence, but that delay is not as great as the one that Intel has experienced with its recent “Skylake” Xeon SP processor launch, which was expected last September and then was held off formally until July. We had heard Power9 iron would launch in July, then in October, and now we are hearing maybe in December.
It is unusual for there not to be …
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Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey
October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In days gone by, IBM used to have a great amount of insight into what was going on at AS/400 shops. But somewhere between the iSeries and through the System i down to Power Systems running IBM i and what is, apparently, being called Db2 instead of DB2 these days, with or without i, Big Blue stopped having the kind of insight that helped us not only understand the trends in our community, but how they related – or didn’t – to the larger IT community.
This community, which is more than a marketplace but still encompasses that, has always …
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The Necessity Of A Power Systems 911
September 25, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
People are starting to talk about the future, and in some cases perhaps impending, Power9 systems from IBM and its OpenPower partners. The chatter is about machines with two, four, eight, or 16 processors, so far at least. But the one thing I am not hearing anyone talk about is an entry Power box, either with or without the Cognitive Systems label, that has a modestly configured processor complex that is suitable for the IBM i workloads in the current customer base and yet allows them to affordably and quickly expand their capacity to absorb more and more workloads in …
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IBM Inks In End Of Support For Power6 And Power7 Iron
September 25, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In case you didn’t notice it, IBM is getting ready to embark on a new generation of systems, based on its “Nimbus” and “Cumulus” Power9 chips.
When new gear is entering the product catalog, IBM has a few tools to help encourage customers to move ahead rather than sitting tight. First, it tends to withdraw the older stuff – in this case systems using Power6, Power6+, Power 7, and Power7+ processors – from marketing. That sends the signal that customers won’t be able to get new processor cards, memory cards, and other peripherals for these machines. Then, IBM can raise …
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Crazy Idea # 542: Port IBM i To The Mainframe
September 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In case you didn’t know it, and why would you care, IBM launched the new System z14 mainframe back in June, was talking about the new z14 motors it uses in August, and has just last week launched the LinuxOne “Emperor II” Linux-only mainframe variant of that platform. The machine, as always, has some impressive engineering. And it got me to thinking. Which is always dangerous.
Here is a crazy idea. No, this is really crazy, unlike some of my other inspirations, which of course make perfect sense. Maybe IBM should converge the Power Systems and System z lines, and …
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The State Of Systems In The Second Quarter
September 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The server refresh cycle that we have all been expecting in 2017 is well under way, and in fact, it looks like it is better than expected by some measures.
The box counters at IDC said in releasing their server shipment and revenue numbers for the second quarter of 2017 that they had been undercounting the number of machines made by original design manufacturers (ODMs) and sold directly to the big hyperscalers and cloud builders to the tune of an average of $1 billion per quarter since 2013. Looking back a year, to the second quarter of 2016, the amount …
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The Chatter About Future Power9 Servers
September 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In late July, the first of the Power9 systems, the one code-named “Witherspoon” that was designed explicitly to be installed in the “Summit” and “Sierra” clustered supercomputers installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively, started rolling off the production line at Big Blue and into those HPC centers that are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is the beginning, however quiet, of what we expect will be a rolling thunder rollout of Power9 systems in late 2017 and through early 2018.
Because there have been so many processor announcements in the past …
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Sundry Withdrawals For Power7 And Power7+ Gear
August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The sunrise of the Power9 systems is moving in slow motion and we no longer expect to see shiny new iron using this state of the art processor running either IBM i or AIX until sometime early in 2018. It is looking like maybe March or April at the moment. But the sunsetting of vintage Power Systems iron that will be displaced by the arrival of the Power9 machines is proceeding.
Trying to figure out what is being ripped out of the IBM catalog, and when it will be removed from the sales channel, is more difficult than trying to …
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Why Not Overclock Power Chips For IBM i?
August 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Remember way back in 2000, when Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer and now the world’s dominant supplier of processors in the datacenter, said that it would be able to deliver processors that run at 10 GHz by 2011. Well, that was six years ago, and that sure as hell did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. But if anyone can crank the clocks high on a processor, it is IBM with its Power and System z engines, and we think it can push them a little higher and give certain customers who …
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IBM Moves HMC Management To Native Power Server, LPARs
August 14, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Out of band management is not a new thing in the IT sector, and many of the best and most sophisticated pieces of software in the world have a distinct management console of some sort that gathers up the state of a machine or collection of machines and uses it to initially configure those devices and to coerce them to behave themselves despite their nature for electronic mischief.
The Hardware Management Console, or HMC, has been around for so long in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i line for so long we can’t remember when people were not …
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