• 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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• IBM Pulls The Plug On First Pass Power9 Entry Machines

  November 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is probably not a big deal to a lot of IBM i shops, but it might matter to service providers or enterprises with multiple machines that have been qualified by testing people, and to software vendors that need to certify their software on specific hardware platforms. And so we bring it up.

  The it we are talking about is in announcement letter 920-152, and it is the withdrawal of the original entry Power9 systems lineup, which IBM often calls the “scale out” machines because they are intended to be used for distributed computing clusters. But one company’s node …

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• Tweaks To Power System Iron Complement TR Updates

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in July, IBM upgraded the peripheral I/O on several of its Power9-based servers with more PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth capacity, and now IBM is offering the increased bandwidth on several machines tuned up for running SAP HANA in addition to making a number of other hardware enhancements and withdrawals.

  In announcement letter 120-054 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H922, a two-socket, 2U server, and in announcement letter 120-055 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H924, a two-socket, 4U system. As far as I can tell, the machines are essentially …

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• COVID-19 Delivers 2020 Clarity for Omnichannel

  September 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The viral pandemic is impacting society in profound and multi-faceted ways. In the consumer goods supply chain, which includes a good chunk of IBM i shops, COVID-19 is forcing manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to get a lot nimbler in a hurry — particularly as it relates to diversifying sales channels and embracing omnichannel fulfillment strategies.

  Ecommerce has exploded during COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, as consumers elect to make purchases online instead of venturing into stores, which raises the risk of being exposed to the novel coronavirus. According to Adobe Analytics’ Digital Economy Index, ecommerce spending surged by 78 …

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• The Battle Of The Single-Core IBM i Machines

  July 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM announced a revamped lineup of entry Power9 systems, including a new single-core variant of the Power S922 server aimed at IBM i shops that will replace the long-running Power S812 and the Power S914 for IBM i customers with modest compute performance and storage requirements. The announcement of the single-core Power S922 comes just as the stay of execution for the Power S812 will be running out on August 31.

  In the issue last week, we told you that we didn’t have a lot of the details on the pricing of the new single-core Power …

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• IBM Revamps Entry Power Servers With Expanded I/O, Utility Pricing

  July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Believe it or not, but it has been two and a half years since the first Power9 server shipped and it has been more than two years since the entry Power Systems machines – that would be the Power S914, the Power S922, and the Power S924 machines, code-named “ZZ” after the country-rock-blues band from Houston – were first announced. And today, these machines are getting an I/O makeover.

  And specially for IBM i shops, IBM is rolling out a single-core version of the Power S922 that will offer better bang for the buck as well as lower acquisition cost …

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• IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn

  May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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• FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

  February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

  Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …

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• IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.

  This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …

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