• 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 …

  Read more

• 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, …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• More Withdrawals For Vintage Power Gear

  August 27, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In with the new and out with the old, as the adage goes. With the Power9 line of Power Systems machines all out and for the most part available – with the exception of the high end Power E980 that will be available in stages in September and November – it is time to start winding down more of the older stuff.

  In announcement letter 918-097, IBM started to remove more things from the product catalog. The most important one in this round will happen on October 19, and that is when companies will no longer be able to …

  Read more

• IBM Adds Mainstream Flash Drives To Power Systems

  August 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We tend to be focused on compute in the IT industry, and the CPUs get a lot of the glory. But the fastest CPU in the world doesn’t amount to anything without peripherals to keep it fed. That is why, of course, that the main frame was called that, after all. There were plenty of other frames surrounding it, making it into a system.

  This holds as true for the Power Systems machines as much as any other machine, and whether or not they are running IBM i, too. The good news is that IBM does a fairly good …

  Read more

• Drilling Down Into The Power E980

  August 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On August 7, IBM announced the two machines that are based on the “Cumulus” scale-up versions of the Power9 processors – the Power E950 midrange box that scales up to four sockets and the Power E980 big iron machine that scales up to 16 sockets. The IBM i platform is not available on the Power E950, so IBM i customers who need more than a two-socket Power9 machine to support their workloads have to make a jump to a single-node implementation of the Power E980.

  This is the same situation that customers faced during the Power8 era, so it is …

  Read more

• IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

  July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …

  Read more

• IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

  July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

  In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …

  Read more

• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

  Read more

• IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

  June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles