• 2024: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to believe that yet another year is coming to a close. As 2024 rolls to its merciful end, it’s time for us to take stock of the major events and announcements that impacted the IBM i community.

  January

  News broke in late January that revenue in IBM’s Power Systems business grew for the second year in a row in 2023. TPM’s model showed $1.53 billion in external Power Systems sales for the year, which was a hair above the 2022 figure, which was a hair above the 2021 figure. It’s not 2010-era numbers, when the figure was north …

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• Sundry Hardware Announcements Accompany IBM i TR Updates

  October 14, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With high-end Power10 machines coming out in September 2021 and most of the Power10 lineup coming in July 2022, we don’t expect much in the way of substantial Power10 system announcement at this point in that processor’s lifecycle. The “Bonnell” entry Power S1012 machine from this year May is, in fact, probably the last Power10 machine to come out the door until Power11 systems come out next year some time.

  But IBM is always tweaking things here and there when it comes to hardware features and bundles, and so it is with the October IBM i platform updates. We saw …

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• IBM Kills Off Entry Power Server Hardware Subscription, Old Features

  August 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been talking about offering a complete IBM system, including hardware, software, and support, as a single offering and under a single price, for more than two years now. The company talked about it back in July 2022, and we got the full scoop on pricing on the IBM i System Subscription, the first instantiation on the Power S1024 server, back in September 2022.

  This looked like the wave of the future, with a single per user cost of around $50 per month per user for a machine, which as we pointed out at the time, is …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1012

  May 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has taken almost two years to complete the Power10 server set and it has been almost four years since we first wrote about the details of the Power10 processor, but with the launch of the “Bonnell” Power S1012 entry server last week, which will start shipping on June 14, the set is indeed complete. Unless something weird happens, there will be no additional Power Systems servers announced until the Power11 iron starts rolling out sometime in 2025.

  Last week we told you what we knew about the Power S1012, and this week we have gotten our hands on …

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• IBM Sharpens Its Edge With “Bonnell” Entry Power10 System

  May 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Through the many years that we have been following the OS/400 and IBM i platform, we have always been an advocate for powerful entry machines that act as a feeder into the larger machines into which customers might grow. Somewhere between 1988 and 2008, Moore’s Law outpaced the capacity increases that most small IBM i shops needed, and it has been difficult to make a machine that is small enough to be useful and cheap enough to be attractive yet expensive enough to make it all worth IBM’s while.

  Back in February 2017, Big Blue announced what we called the …

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• IBM Pushes Storage Limits With Storage Scale 6000

  December 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently unveiled a new high-end all-flash storage array that pushes the limits of I/O. Dubbed the IBM Storage Scale System 6000, the new array gives users 1.44 PB of storage in a 4U chassis with up to an eye-watering 256 GB/sec of bandwidth and 7 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance.

  Few IBM i shops have the need for that sort of performance with traditional business applications. Indeed, with its Storage Scale parallel file system (the new name given to IBM’s General Parallel File System, or GPFS, which also previously went by the name Spectrum Scale), the …

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• Power10 Systems Get Storage And I/O Enhancements

  October 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a spring-fall cadence to the Power Systems platform from IBM, and so when the second batch if Technology Refreshes come around this time of year, we expect to see some hardware updates, too.

  In recent years, we have been hoping – as always – that there would be a Power8+ or Power9+ processor enhancement around halfway through those processor family cycles, because that usually provides a price/performance kicker. But this has not happened during this generation as it did with the Power4+, Power5+, Power6+, and Power7+ generations. And we intend to put the pressure on IBM for a …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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• Direct Attached Storage Gets Massive NVM-Express Expansion

  April 12, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The storage area network – a giant wonking storage server with lots of lossless Fibre Channel switching between servers that share access to virtual storage partitions – has been around for several decades now. And despite all of the talk of its ubiquity, and usefulness in driving up storage utilization across a bunch of servers and therefore helping drive down the cost of that storage while also enhancing its manageability and shareability, for many IBM i shops, using directly attached storage is what they want to do.

  There are reasons for this, of course. In many cases, the IBM i …

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• Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O

  October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.

  Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:

  “IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …

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