• Building A More Perfect IBM i Cloud On Power10 Iron

  January 24, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we get closer to the launch of the entry and midrange Power10 machines, we can’t help but think about the innovative uses that these machines might be put to. We think, for instance, that these machines could be the foundation of a new generation – and a new kind – of IBM i cloud based on a mix of entry one-socket Power S1021 and two-socket Power S1022, and Power S1024 machines augmented in a very special way with four-socket Power E1050s.

  To one way of thinking, the easiest way to build a big cloud capable of supporting thousands of …

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• IBM Clarifies Utility Pricing, Adds Solution Edition For New Entry Power Server

  August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the middle of July, IBM announced new entry Power Systems servers – tweaks to the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 to be specific – that had expanded PCI-Express 4.0 I/O capability as well as a new utility pricing scheme on the Power S922 and Power S924 that helps to lower the capital outlay for buying servers and makes it a little bit more like the economic experience on the public clouds.

  This utility pricing, known as the Power Systems Private Cloud Solution, has been available the Power E950 midrange and Power E980 high-end systems since it …

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