Commercial Performance Workload Archives

For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …
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Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …
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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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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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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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For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

Bang For The Buck On Power9 Entry Hardware

The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown

IBM Preps Power9 “ZZ” Systems For Imminent Launch

Content archive

Recent Posts

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