• The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

  For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

  A lot more than you probably think, as it …

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• Systems Software Stack Gets A Refresh With Power10

  September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When there is new server hardware, the systems software stack needs to be tweaked to support it and to take better advantage of it. And that is also a perfect time to add new features to the systems software that can be supported on older iron. (But not too old or customers will never move forward. . . . )

  And so it is with the various core systems software – PowerVM, PowerVC, PowerSC, and the HMC – that runs atop Power Systems machinery and either alongside of or underneath the IBM i operating system and the IBM i Technology …

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• Some Power9 Tweaks And Withdrawals

  September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a very rare announcement cycle where IBM announces a new machine and does not offer some tweaks to or withdrawals for older machinery. And, as we always expect, Big Blue did both as part of the September 8 IBM i and Power E1080 server announcements.

  In announcement letter 121-052, IBM made some tweaks to the NVM-Express U.2 form factor solid state flash drives for the Power9 entry, midrange, and high end servers. The new U.2 flash drives have an 800 GB capacity and are aimed at AIX and Linux partitions that have 4K block sizes. These drives …

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• IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First

  September 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After a long, long wait – it has been nearly four years since the first Power9 machine was launched in the “Witherspoon” Power AC922 supercomputing node back in December 2017 based on the 24-core “Nimbus” Power9 processor and just over three years since the high-end “Fleetwood” Power E980 system debuted with the 12-core “Cumulus” Power9 variant – the first machines out of IBM based on the Power10 processor are being unveiled.

  The expected three-year cadence between processor generations set by IBM a long time ago has worked out almost precisely for high-end Power Systems shops, with today’s launch of the …

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• Balancing Supply And Demand For Impending Big Power10 Iron

  August 9, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive …

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• IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

  Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …

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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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• Sundry Power Systems Cloud Announcements

  April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  April is generally a busy time for the Power Systems team, and not just for IBM i, but also for AIX and sometimes for Linux, too. In the spirit of Power Systems family unity, and in recognition of the fact that more than a few IBM i shops also have AIX and/or Linux in their shops, we wanted to tell you about some tweaks that Big Blue has made to the other platforms in the Power Systems family.

  In announcement letter 221-099, IBM is making some tweaks to the Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition stack of software. The components …

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• Crazy Idea Number 615: Variable Priced Power Systems Partitions

  April 5, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you stare down the blank page as much as I have in my career, you learn to not be afraid of that blank page. If you look at it long enough – usually for only a few minutes – ideas flip into existence like quantum particles spinning their curlicues. Most of them are silly, some are utterly useless, but eventually you get one that is worth following to see where it might go.

  So it is with an idea that popped into my head, which was a daydream about IBM creating variable priced partitions on the Power Systems machines. …

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• Skytap To Expand IBM i Cloud Offering

  March 31, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The Power Systems S922 is the go-to server for many cloud providers, including Skytap, which sells access to and manages IBM i, AIX, and Linux environments in Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. But as its cloud business grows, Skytap is finding that some of its customers are getting close to hitting their heads on the S922’s processing ceiling, which has precipitated a need for bigger boxes.

  Skytap is currently scoping out the available Power Systems server lineup in anticipation of rolling out a second, larger Power offering, says Skytap Vice President Dan Jones.

  “One of the key hurdles we want …

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