CPW Archives - IT Jungle

Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …
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Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future …
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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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No Room For Cloudy Thinking When Moving To The Cloud

October 15, 2018 Doug Mewmaw

With new IT innovation, comes new IT thinking. That’s the way it’s always been.

Right now, that new shiny IT toy that everyone must have is the cloud. In fact, the global market for managed services will grow from $107 billion in 2014 to $193 billion by 2019. As a result, Managed Services Providers (MSPs) are trying to convince CIOs to not only outsource their data center administration, but to trust them that they can manage their entire IT enterprise cheaper and more efficiently.

Unfortunately, they both may just have their head in the clouds. You see, I’ve been here …
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The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.

This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …
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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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