• 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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• IBM Tweaks Some Power Systems Prices Down, Others Up

  March 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in September and November of last year, with inflation running a bit crazy, IBM raised prices on selected Power Systems hardware and software with the price changes taking effect on January 1 this year. We went into the details back then, of course, but we are being proactive in looking for any price hikes that might come out of Big Blue relating to its Power Systems machines, systems software, and related storage and networking. And, as it turns out, there have been some more pricing actions that you need to be aware of.

  As we have pointed out …

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• Some Power Systems Hardware Tweaks

  October 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever there is a software update on the Power Systems line, IBM usually has a few hardware announcements to toss into the mix. And last week was no exception, although there were not any new systems announced. Just tweaks to existing ones.

  In announcement letter 122-084, we see that IBM is reselling Nvidia’s two port, 100 Gb/sec ConnectX-6 DX network interface card on the Power10 lineup. This is a very popular NIC out there in Server Land, and in fact, it has been in short enough supply in the past year and change to actually have an impact on …

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• Power10 Midrange Machine: The Power E1050

  August 15, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is fifth part of our in-depth coverage of the entry and midrange Power10 machines that were announced on July 12. This week, we end the hardware deep dives with a look at the Power E1050 midrange machine. This is one of the best and most capable servers that Big Blue has ever designed, and it is a damned shame that it does not run the IBM i operating system.

  But, as we have pointed out before, it can any time IBM is convinced by enough of you that it should. The lack of IBM i support is a marketing …

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• Power10 Entry Machines: The Power S1024 And Power L1024

  August 8, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is fourth part of our in-depth coverage of the entry and midrange Power10 machines that were announced on July 12 and that started shipping a few weeks later. This week, we go over the last of the machines that can run the IBM i operating system, the Power S1024 and its quasi-Linux-only companion, the Power L1024.

  We already went through the Power S1014, the Power S1022s, and the Power S1022 and its quasi-Linux-only variant, the Power L1022. And next week, we will take a look at the midrange Power E1050 – which does not support the IBM i operating …

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• Power9 Servers Get Updated Flash Drives

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may be on the verge of launching its entry and midrange Power10 servers in July, as we reported last week, but that doesn’t mean it will not continue to sell Power9-based machines for now and out past the general availability of the Power10-based systems.

  To that end, in announcement letter 122-042, IBM is adding new enterprise-grade flash drives in the U.2 form factor that is roughly analogous to a 2.5-inch disk drive. These new drives, which come from an unnamed source, support the NVM-Express protocol that speeds up flash drives (because they stop talking the SCSI disk …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

  March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21^st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.

  So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …

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• Supply Chain Problems Cause Power Systems SAS Controller Shortage

  December 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The coronavirus pandemic has been doing strange things to the world’s supply chains for nearly two years now, and all things considered, the Power Systems platform has been largely spared from any serious issues. Until now.

  We have just caught wind of a notice that Tech Data has sent out to all of its Power Systems business partners that IBM has plenty of SAS disk drives and SAS flash drives, but that “demand currently exceeds supply availability” for SAS controllers and SAS backplanes. The shortage just hit hard in the past week or so, and now orders that have SAS …

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• Inside The IBM “Denali” Power E1080 System

  November 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With Big Blue not really shipping its Power10-based big, bad “Denali” Power E1080 system in full volume and with full configurations until December, we knew we would have some time to dig down into the architecture of the Denali systems. And with other things out of the way, which also needed to be covered, including our initial coverage on the Power E1080 machine on September 8 and some follow-on stories, we are now eagerly taking the lid off the Denali machine and taking a hard look at it for you.

  Seriously. Here is the machine with the lid off of …

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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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