• Boston Power9s Set To Debut

  May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power9 systems aimed at data ingest and data analytics, code-named “Boston” after the band from Beantown that features what is arguably the tightest album side in classic rock music, are now out and will be available by the end of the month. These are Linux-only machines, and like some of the prior LC models (short for Linux Cluster, not Low Cost as I keep thinking it means) based on Power8 processors, these were created by Supermicro and are resold by IBM as well as being sold by Supermicro in its SuperServer line.

  IBM is, of course, Supermicro’s biggest customer …

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• Sundry IBM Announcements For Power Systems

  April 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a quiet time in the Power Systems line, with the “ZZ” entry Power9 machines just announced in February and shipping in March and other machines not expected until the third quarter. But there are always some little things happening here and there, and you keep us around so we catch wind of them and report them to you.

  First up, in announcement letter 118-036, IBM is offering new processor features and memory sticks for the Power H922 and Power H924 systems that are designed primarily to run the SAP HANA in-memory database on Linux atop Power, but …

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• The Performance Impact Of Spectre And Meltdown

  March 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting to see what impact on performance the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution patches, which plug some security vulnerability holes that search engine giant Google discovered last summer and made public in early January, would have on Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system.

  Now that Big Blue has published the first edition of the Power Systems Performance Report that includes the new “ZZ” Power 9-based systems, we not only get a sense of the relative performance of the “Nimbus” Power9 chip for entry servers. We also can figure out the performance impact of the …

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• Drilling Down Into The New Power9 Entry Servers

  February 19, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last Wednesday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you a high-level overview of the six new Power9 entry servers, code-named “ZZ” by IBM, as well as an initial pass on the changes that came with the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3. If you haven’t read these, please do, because they give you information on IBM’s strategy with regard to the Power9 iron and the IBM i platform.

  In this issue, we are going to drill down into the six new Power9 systems, taking particular care with the single-socket Power S914 and dual-socket Power …

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• IBM Readies Mainstream Power9 Iron For Launch

  February 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The natives are getting restless, as my parents used to say when we were getting hungry. And the IBM i and AIX bases are definitely getting restless to know what Power9 iron that will be able to run Big Blue’s own operating systems in conjunction with the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor. They also want to know if IBM is going to give customers a big improvement in price/performance compared to Power7+ and Power8 machines that are still widely available in the channel.

  In short, they want to plan their future, and after four years of waiting, it is time.

  IBM …

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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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• IBM’s Systems Group On The Financial Rebound

  January 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We like to start with the good news here in 2018, and the good news is that IBM had a very good quarter in its systems business, so we can all start breathing a little easier and Hitachi can put that checkbook away because Big Blue ain’t going to be selling off its System z and Power Systems business any time soon.

  (We are joking there. We think. . . . and hope.)

  In the final quarter of 2017 ended in December, the mainframe saw sales shoot up 71 percent thanks to the System z14 refresh that started in …

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• 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 …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• Counting The Cost

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are strong believers in being thorough with both the technical and economic analysis of platforms. In the absence of a lot of performance and pricing information on Power Systems iron, we are always looking for ways to help IBM i shops try to figure out what to do when they are thinking about upgrading a machine or just tossing out the old one and buying a new one.

  IBM isn’t shipping Power9-based machines that can support IBM i as yet, and it is not expected to do so until early next year. But in the meantime, Big Blue wants …

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