• A Slew Of Power Systems Features Are Being Sunsetted

  July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has long since stopped selling Power8 machinery and has been winding down sales of Power9-based systems as its Power10 machines, which made their debut in late 2021 and early 2022, are ascending. So, it is natural that features for Power8 and Power9 machinery are being withdrawn. But even some features with the newer Power10 machines are also being withdrawn, in some cases because supplies are running out and in other cases because better features have been introduced.

  You have to keep up with these things so you can get what you need before IBM stops selling whatever that …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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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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• Stacking Up IBM i On Entry Power10 Iron Against Windows Servers

  April 3, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Because of the dearth of commercial benchmarks that are run on IBM’s Power Systems machines these days, it is hard to make direct comparisons between machines based on Big Blue’s Power10 processor and the Windows Server and Linux platforms – generally an X86 system based on a processor from Intel or AMD. But it is not impossible to do.

  And it is an important exercise not because you are thinking of moving off the platform, which of course you are not contemplating, but because by doing this math you can show that it is not really much cheaper to buy …

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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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• IBM To Chase Oracle Accounts With 24-Core Power S1014

  December 19, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are selling enterprise-grade servers that are explicitly designed to be data threshers running relational databases, then you have to deal with Oracle. Of course, Oracle does not have much of a server business of its own these days, not like it dreamed of having when it bought Sun Microsystems nearly a decade and a half ago.

  Oracle still sells its Oracle X9-2 and X9-2L two-socket servers based on Intel “Ice Lake” Xeon SPs as well as its ancient Sparc T8 and M8 servers from nearly a decade ago. And it still says its Exadata database clusters, which compete …

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• A Smattering Of Power Systems Announcements

  December 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We keep saying that IBM is winding down its announcement stream as 2022 comes to a close, but there is still a trickle of things being announced by Big Blue, both new products and withdrawals, that relate to the Power Systems platform and its adjacent external storage.

  First of all, in announcement letter 122-134, IBM is allowing customers – as promised back at the COMMON POWERUp event in October – to run the AIX and Linux operating systems on that special configuration of the Power 1022s machine that has two four-core Power10 dual chip modules (DCMs) in the box …

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• Power S1022s Tweaked To Do Native IBM i With More I/O

  October 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our apologies, but we did not see an important new configuration of the Power S1022s entry server that IBM offered to IBM i customers in announcement letter 122-084 on October 11.

  Buried down at the bottom of this announcement, which was mostly about some peripheral enhancements that we did cover in the issue of The Four Hundred following the announcements, was the following statement:

  “IBM Power now offers a Power S1022s (MTM 9105-22B) configuration with two sockets populated with 4-core processors (#EPGR) with a maximum of eight cores active. This configuration is available at a P10 IBM i software tier …

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• Without Further Ado: Power10 Entry Server Pricing

  September 26, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been through the new Power10 entry servers from just about every angle imaginable, which has been our great pleasure. And now, we come to the moment we have all been waiting for: What is the bang for the buck of a Power10 machine? As is usually the case when you ask any question, the answer is: It depends.

  To try to figure this out, we put together pricing information for all of the different variations of processors for the Power8, Power9, and now Power10 entry servers with one of two processors. And when we say all of …

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• IBM’s Competitive Analysis For Power10 Entry Machines

  August 22, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Long gone are the days when IBM, and indeed most other server vendors, clamored to run TPC-C, SAP SD, and SPEC JVM transaction processing benchmark tests on their new machines to prove they had the performance and they had the bang for the buck to compete in the broader market.

  To be fair, many of those tests had their flaws, allowing a certain amount of gaming of the benchmarks (as happened with the TPC-C and SPEC JVM tests) or not having official pricing attached to them (as happened with the SPEC JVM and SAP SD tests). Still, those benchmarks, as …

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