OLTP Archives - IT Jungle

2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

“First, Power systems …
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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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How IBM Stacks Power Cloud Up Against AWS And Azure

August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have our own habits when it comes to thinking about bang for the buck, and it is refreshing sometimes to just think about how other companies think about it.

As part of the July 14 announcements now almost three weeks ago, IBM not only rolled out new entry Power9 machines with higher I/O bandwidth as well as utility style pricing for on-premises gear to lower capital expenditures. IBM also did a direct comparison of the Power Systems Virtual Server running on the IBM Cloud for a memory-heavy instance and then compared that to fat memory slices running on Amazon …
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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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Analytics Moves To The Cloud, And IBM i Data Goes With It

March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

The cloud is changing the face of IT, much to the chagrin of IBM i traditionalists who are accustomed to having full control over their applications and data. Change is always hard, but the good news is that, with a little discipline, the cloud presents a number of new and exciting analytical options for your important IBM i data.

As a transaction processing powerhouse, the IBM i server is accustomed to hosting the most important data a business ever touches, including data about customers and their purchases. On-prem servers still run the lion’s share of online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads, …
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IBM i Shops Walking A Flatter Upgrade Path In 2020?

January 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In general, there is a rough correlation between growth in online transaction processing workloads and related enterprise applications, and the growth in the overall economy. At some point in the past, when OLTP was relatively new and many companies were still doing batch processing, OLTP workloads grew many times faster than gross domestic product – much as many data analytics, storage, and machine learning workloads are doing today.

So when we see that IBM i shops are looking to upgrade in 2020 at a much higher level than we would expect based on historical and anecdotal trends, it gets our …
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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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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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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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Why Not Overclock Power Chips For IBM i?

August 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Remember way back in 2000, when Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer and now the world’s dominant supplier of processors in the datacenter, said that it would be able to deliver processors that run at 10 GHz by 2011. Well, that was six years ago, and that sure as hell did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. But if anyone can crank the clocks high on a processor, it is IBM with its Power and System z engines, and we think it can push them a little higher and give certain customers who …
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