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How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.

Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …
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Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

October 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of the October Power Systems announcements, IBM has made some minor tweaks to the systems software stack that runs underneath IBM i, AIX, and Linux on its Power-based systems.

In announcement letter 219-451, IBM reveals enhancements to its PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller (which presumably has a pretty short life now that IBM owns Red Hat), and its Virtual HMC (vHMC) hardware management console for Power iron.

The details are a bit thin, but IBM has made improvements with PowerVM V3.1.1 so Live Partition Mobility live migration of logical partitions …
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IBM And Inspur Power Systems Buck The Server Decline Trends

September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the first time in 11 quarters – in other words, since the final quarter of 2016 – the server market contracted. And not just because the hyperscalers and cloud builders were cutting back on spending as they consumed the vast amount of compute capacity that they bought in 2018. Enterprises pulled back on spending, too, and every geographic region and every category of server had declines as well, many of these due to their own independent cycles and some due to macroeconomic effects.

As we reported back in July, the Power Systems business grew 3 percent at constant …
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Power Systems Not Getting 3D XPoint Memory Anytime Soon

April 1, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A lot of people don’t remember this, but Intel was founded in 1968 as a maker of semiconductor main memory for mainframes, and in the early 1970s the company commanded almost as much market share in main memory as it does in datacenter compute today. But as competitors in Japan did a better job ramping up new technologies, by the early 1980s Intel’s market share dropped to somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent, and it had no way to easily or affordably get back into the game, and by 1984 it had to wind down its memory operations. …
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IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …
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The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth

March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.

And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …
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How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

Systems Software Stack Tweaked For Power Systems

IBM And Inspur Power Systems Buck The Server Decline Trends

Power Systems Not Getting 3D XPoint Memory Anytime Soon

IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth

Content archive

Recent Posts

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