Power7 Archives - IT Jungle

The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth

March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.

And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …
Read more
Update On The Spectre And Meltdown Patches For Power

January 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When it comes to the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities that hit as the new year was getting going, the important word to ponder is “mitigated.” Everyone is talking about mitigating the issue, but no one is using the word “fixed.” As we discussed last week, one of the two types of Spectre vulnerabilities – the Variant 2 known as branch target injection – is particularly tricky to hack and to fix, so IT vendors are choosing their words very carefully.

The odds were that unintended consequences for such a low-level fix will occur, so you can …
Read more
IBM Wheels And Deals For Power Linux, But Where Is IBM i?

October 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

“A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. …
Read more
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 …
Read more
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 …
Read more
Sundry Withdrawals For Power7 And Power7+ Gear

August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The sunrise of the Power9 systems is moving in slow motion and we no longer expect to see shiny new iron using this state of the art processor running either IBM i or AIX until sometime early in 2018. It is looking like maybe March or April at the moment. But the sunsetting of vintage Power Systems iron that will be displaced by the arrival of the Power9 machines is proceeding.

Trying to figure out what is being ripped out of the IBM catalog, and when it will be removed from the sales channel, is more difficult than trying to …
Read more
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 …
Read more
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 …
Read more

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search