Power6 Archives - IT Jungle

For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …
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Some Insight Into The IBM i On Power Systems Base

December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is pretty secretive about its systems business, but is really no worse than its peers in this regard. Big Blue wants to get enough information out there to keep customers comfortable about the future, keep Wall Street happy about its revenues and prospects for the immediate future (meaning one to three quarters out), and keep its competitors from getting too much insight into how it is doing in the systems racket.

Every now and then, we get some insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, and as part of a discussion we had recently about upgrade and …
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The Power8 Era Is Drawing To A Close

October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

They have had a good, long run, perhaps longer than anyone would have thought except that with Moore’s Law losing steam, the gap between processor generations is stretching out further and further. The entry Power8-based Power Systems machines – the ones that are most commonly used by IBM i shops – made their debut in April 2014. And now they are getting reading to make their exit.

Big Blue likes to give customers a warning when things are ripped out of the product catalog, to its great credit, giving its channel partners and end users a chance to adjust …
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Riding The Upgrade Cycle

October 8, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In an ideal world, all servers would always be new and all operating systems and applications would be patched and running in optimal form. But we don’t live in that world. And that means for many customers that don’t have bales of money sitting around, sometimes the IBM i platform starts to get a little long in the tooth.

That is certainly the case for parts of the IBM i installed base. There are still a lot of Power5 and Power5+ customers out there who have resisted the temptation to upgrade their systems for the past five or six generations, …
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The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.

We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …
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The IBM i Base Is Ready To Move On Up

January 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Even the most eager hyperscaler or cloud builder in the world has to let a server sit in place, running workloads, for at least three years to get good value on the dollar spent, and in many cases, machines are repurposed to be in the fleet for longer than that. And no company can accept the risk of changing all machines at the same time, for obvious reasons other than cost, because such a change could be very disruptive to any business. Enterprises tend to have less spare iron and fewer techies, and so they are even more conservative, and …
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More Power7 And Power8 Features To Bite The Rust

October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems catalog just keeps getting skinnier as the Power9 systems launch in early 2018 keeps getting closer. Ironically, as IBM pulls the plug on older Power Systems machines and their features, it is a good indication that Big Blue really is preparing the way for Power9. It is also a way to get customers who have no intention of spending on Power9 iron to buy something on their older gear before the features go away.

I saw a new abbreviation in announcement letter 917-177, which came out on October 24, and that was LTB – short for …
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IBM Inks In End Of Support For Power6 And Power7 Iron

September 25, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In case you didn’t notice it, IBM is getting ready to embark on a new generation of systems, based on its “Nimbus” and “Cumulus” Power9 chips.

When new gear is entering the product catalog, IBM has a few tools to help encourage customers to move ahead rather than sitting tight. First, it tends to withdraw the older stuff – in this case systems using Power6, Power6+, Power 7, and Power7+ processors – from marketing. That sends the signal that customers won’t be able to get new processor cards, memory cards, and other peripherals for these machines. Then, IBM can raise …
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IBM Commits To Power9 Upgrades For Big Power Systems Shops

July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

While there are plenty of small and midsized shops that make up the majority of installations of Power Systems running IBM i, it is the larger customers – a few hundred really big ones and several thousand pretty big ones – that generate the majority of the revenues for hardware, software, and services for the platform. So what IBM does or does not do to protect the investments of these large customers will affect the smoothness of a product transition like the Power9 one that will start early next year.

With each generational change, whether it is a baseline processor …
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Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear

April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.

But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …
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