TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 75 Archives

Frank Soltis Discusses A Possible Future for Single-Level Storage

November 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

Single-level storage is one of the most unique and compelling characteristics of the architecture underlying the IBM i server and its predecessor business machines. But how would it look running in a massive supercomputer or deep learning system? According to Frank Soltis, who spoke last week at COMMON Europe’s virtual event, it’s something that’s being considered.

Doctor Frank, of course, is a much-revered figure in the history of the IBM midrange line. He was part of the team at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, that led the development of the single-level storage memory architecture in the S/38 machine that …
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Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA

November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

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, which absolutely justifies the …
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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 …
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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 …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 47

November 23, 2020 Doug Bidwell

As we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, there is a new security bulletin that has been issued relating to a speculative execution vulnerability that affects Power9 systems running the Virtual I/O Server in general and AIX 7.1 and AIX 7.2 in particular. As such, it indirectly affects all four IBM i releases, from 7.1 through 7.4. See Security Bulletin: Vulnerability CVE-2020-4788 at this link.

The patches to deal with this vulnerability are as follows:
- IBM i 7.4: MF68089 and MF68090
- IBM i 7.3: MF68094 and MF68095
- IBM i 7.2: MF68096 and MF68097
- IBM i
…
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Frank Soltis Discusses A Possible Future for Single-Level Storage

Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA

IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

Security Vulnerability In VIOS, AIX, And Maybe IBM i

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 47

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