• Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM Hypervisor

  May 22, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) put out a notice on Wednesday, May 17, to inform the Power Systems installed base that there is a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor. You can see the PSIRT notice at this link and the Security Bulletin: This Power System firmware update is being released to address CVE 2023-30438 at this link. This has a CVSS base score of 9.3, which means it is critical.

  We very rarely see any security vulnerabilities being reported for the PowerVM hypervisor or for the IBM i operating system itself, for that matter, …

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• The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin

  May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.

  The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …

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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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• A Hodge Podge Of Power Systems Stuff

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday and ends up being a kind of lightweight Power Systems announcement day. That happened last week as IBM’s top brass in the Power Systems division discussed the priorities for the Power Systems line in 2023, which we covered in the top story in last Wednesday’s issue, and the subscription-based pricing for IBM i on all Power9 and Power10 machines, which we covered in this week’s top story.

  There is always some other stuff that IBM does on Power Systems announcement day, and February 14, 2023, is no exception.

  Announcement letter 120-017 has …

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• The IBM i Power10 Upgrade Cycle Forecast Looks Favorable

  February 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we talked about last week in going over IBM’s financial results for the fourth quarter, the Power Systems business increased its revenues by 6.5 percent in 2022 thanks to a Power10 upgrade cycle that started in the fall of 2021 with high-end machines and built momentum in the summer of 2022 as the entry and midrange Power10 machines were delivered in the market.

  In general, IBM tells Wall Street to expect that its overall Infrastructure business group will have flat revenues, with some quarters up during the beginning of an upgrade cycle and down at the end of it. …

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• IBM Publishes Power10 Performance Optimize Guide

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops looking to squeeze the most performance out of their Power10 servers have a lot of options available at their disposal. IBM covers many, if not all, of them in its latest performance paper, titled “IBM Power10 performance optimization for IBM i,” which it released last week.

  The Power10 is the most powerful processor IBM ever built. Compared to the Power9 processor, the Power10 delivers 20 percent to 30 percent higher performance per core. And with 25 percent more cores per socket, that means oodles of more processing power to do useful work.

  At a system level, the …

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• Various Power Systems Software Tweaks Besides The TR Updates

  October 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is fall IBM i software stack refresh week. As we report about elsewhere in this issue, IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 1 and IBM i 7.4 Technology Refresh 7 came out today, and as is Big Blue’s custom in recent years, other parts of the IBM i software stack also got some nips and tucks and tweaks, too.

  In announcement letter 222-279, we find the usual agglomeration of updates to the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor, the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, the virtual Hardware Management Console, and the Cloud Management Console.

  With PowerVM, IBM wanted to …

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• A Smorgasbord Of Power Systems Stuff

  September 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is usually pretty quiet on the IT front in the wake of the American Labor Day holiday, especially with a lot of European countries also having bank holidays around that time and many schools just starting back up again. Here in 2022, it is no different, although IBM did uncharacteristically launch the full subscription entry Power S1014 server aimed at IBM i customers on September 6.

  In any event, in the weeks surrounding the holiday, Big Blue did a bunch of stuff relating to the Power Systems platform and we want to tell you about it so you stay …

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• IBM’s Competitive Analysis For The Power10 Midrange Machine

  August 29, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For as long as there has been a Power architecture, way back in 1995 with the advent of the custom “Cobra Muskie” PowerPC AS chips, the rule of thumb for performance is that the Power core did twice the work of an Intel core designed for server workloads. This was true in 1993, when Intel jumped in the server racket with gusto, and it is true 31 years later as the entry and midrange Power10 machines in the same performance class as the top-end X86 iron from Intel and AMD are starting to ramp.

  This performance gap on cores is …

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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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