• IBM Preconfigures Power System Racks Running Oracle Database

  January 17, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are one of the suppliers who still sells Unix and Linux servers for supporting back-end relational databases or platforms that compete against Unix and Linux iron, then Oracle is something you have to contend with either directly or indirectly. As the dominant database platform for running ERP, CRM, SCM, and other applications, you have to partner with Oracle even if you have to compete against the company.

  The good news is that at least Oracle no longer is selling big iron machinery based on the Solaris Unix and the Sparc processors that the company acquired when it bought …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• The Cacophony Of Many Different Server Markets

  September 13, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how skittery the global economy is, how wonky the world’s supply chains are, and how capricious spending by the big public clouds and the hyperscalers can be (and how much the top eight server buyers in the world make up of the overall market), the fact that the server market only had a 2.5 percent decline in the second quarter is not a surprise.

  It’s just the normal noise in the data, and perhaps, if IDC is right, a slight shift away from using two-socket servers with a modest number of cores to single-socket servers with a larger number …

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• Sundry IBM Announcements Of Relevance To Power Shops

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is a particularly calm part of the Power Systems product cycle, and an unusually calm time in the IT market in general. So there ain’t a lot going on out there. But there are a few items from Big Blue that we wanted to make you aware of.

  In announcement letter 621-011, IBM is rolling out a variant of software-defined networking, called IBM Cloud Networking appropriately enough, that can be used to interconnect instances of its X86, Power, and z machinery on the IBM Cloud public cloud to each other and to other cloud services through a series …

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• Don’t Forget About The Co-Lo Alternative To Cloud

  June 21, 2021 Jim Kandrac

  Cloud is a consumption model, not a panacea. And for a lot of customers, moving some of their applications – or even all of them – to the cloud is something to consider. It might even possibly be the right move, right now. But for many customers who are committed to their applications and therefore to their IBM i platform, the best and lowest cost way to get infrastructure to support those applications is still to put machinery on premises or to have it installed in a co-location facility.

  The numbers bear this out, and as we pointed out before …

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• IBM Tweaks Power Systems Hardware Here And There

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, our apologies for taking so long to get to the hardware roundup from the April 13 Power Systems announcements, which brought us new Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4. There were a few changes to the hardware lineup as well, and let’s go through them now.

  As you can see from announcement letter 121-013, IBM has done a refresh on the 2.5-inch flash drives used in the Power9-based server line. According to Douglas Gibbs, offering manager for peripherals at the Cognitive Systems division that is responsible for the Power Systems lineup, this …

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• Don’t Be A Blowhard

  March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.

  Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …

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• Big Blue Rolls Out Red Hat Power Stack

  February 15, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about some of the announcements that Big Blue was packaging up for Power Systems hardware and separately for the combination of its Red Hat systems software stack and Power Systems iron for on premises datacenters. These announcements are slated to go out on February 23, as far as we know, but the IBM Announcement Letter system often has other ideas and sometimes even violates the company’s own embargoes, as if it has a mind of its own.

  (For all we know, something that old and so full of data does have a mind …

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• Tweaks To Power System Iron Complement TR Updates

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in July, IBM upgraded the peripheral I/O on several of its Power9-based servers with more PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth capacity, and now IBM is offering the increased bandwidth on several machines tuned up for running SAP HANA in addition to making a number of other hardware enhancements and withdrawals.

  In announcement letter 120-054 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H922, a two-socket, 2U server, and in announcement letter 120-055 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H924, a two-socket, 4U system. As far as I can tell, the machines are essentially …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 39

  September 30, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  This week, right off the bat, there are a few things you need to be aware of. First of all, there are microcode patches for a bunch of systems.

  Specifically, they are for MTMs – that is short for machine type/model in the business partner lingo – 9008-22L, 9009-22A, 9009-41A, 9009-42A, and 9223-22H. To save you from having to run around the Internet to figure out what machines they are, that is the Power L922 (a Linux-only machine), the Power S922, the Power S914, the Power S924, and the Power H922 for SAP HANA. You can find out more at …

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