A Shot Across The Bow For Power8 Upgrades

November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sales of new Power8-based Power Systems machines by Big Blue have not been possible for years, but customers with existing Power8 iron have been able to get what IBM calls miscellaneous equipment specification, or MES, upgrades of their existing systems to add processing capacity to those vintage machines.

The Power8 lineup, launched in April 2014, and the entry machines in the Power8 lineup were withdrawn at the end of February in 2019, an announcement that IBM made in October 2018 to give customers fair warning. In February 2019, IBM said that it was going to withdraw high-end Power8 machinery …