Power E880 Archives

IBM Adds Deals And Tools To Cloudy Power Service

May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In February last year, Big Blue surprised many of us by announcing that it was putting Power8 and Power9 systems onto the IBM Cloud and offering up true cloud capacity, with utility pricing, for the capacity on Power S922 entry and Power E880 high-end servers. We did a detailed analysis of the Power Systems Virtual Server for IBM Cloud offering here, and talked about the pricing for compute, storage, and networking for the service there. The offering was first available in June of last year, and subsequently the Power E980 has been added to the mix.

Now, we …
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IBM Brings Flexible Utility Pricing To Private Power Systems

May 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A lot of people, including us, focus on the technologies that go into private, on-premises cloudy infrastructure and how that is almost always distinct from compute, storage, and networking technologies based on the same raw compute – Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or IBM Power, pick one – available on the public cloud. But there is an equally important gap between private and public clouds, and that is the pricing methodology for the two.

IBM’s Cognitive Systems division, which controls the Power Systems platform, wants to close that pricing gap by adopting the same flexible, utility-style pricing for on-premises Power Systems …
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How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong

February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …
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More Vintage Power Systems Stuff Gets The Plug Pulled

November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We are well into the Power9 era and looking ahead to the Power10 and Power11 era, so it is no surprise at all that IBM is looking to streamline its product catalog and empty out its barns of old equipment. In announcement letter 919-139, which somehow slipped our attention two weeks ago on October 22, a whole bunch of Power Systems stuff got the axe, with withdrawal dates ranging from right now until February 2020.

On October 22, IBM i 6.1.1, with its machine code, will no longer be available for ordering on a slew of machines. This is …
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Pricing Revealed For IBM i Slices On IBM Cloud

June 17, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Today is the day. You can finally go out onto the IBM i Cloud and buy on-demand slices of Power-based systems from Big Blue itself and load up the IBM i operating system and integrated database and do actual work on it. And, if it floats your boat, you can run AIX partitions on the IBM Cloud, too, on the same Power S922 and Power E880 iron that IBM is making available and carving up with its homegrown PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor.

IBM revealed its plans for IBM i and AIX on its own public cloud, called the Power …
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It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …
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IBM Gives A Peek Of The Future At POWERUp 2019

May 20, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would not be a COMMON, or even a POWERUp, conference without some glimpse into the future by IBM to give customers of its Power Systems line a sense of what lies ahead near the horizon. By doing so, Big Blue can provide comfort to customers that it is working on future technologies and services without revealing its hand too much to competitors.

Steve Sibley, vice president of offerings for the Cognitive Systems division, which is the part of IBM that makes and sells Power Systems iron, participated in the opening session of the POWERUp 2019 conference in Anaheim on …
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Tweaking Systems And Withdrawal Symptoms

March 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A system product line does not always come out finished and complete, all at once, and its retirement from the sales catalog and the field is not always a simple and smooth thing, either. After a certain amount of criticism from its largest customers, Big Blue last year decided that it would get a little bit more orderly about the latter, as machines are withdrawn from marketing and eventually support. As for the former, well, there are always some nips and tucks that are done here and there as parts of the system are tweaked to meet specific customer demands. …
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IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …
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IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …
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