• IBM Expands Flash Drives For Power8 Iron

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October, IBM announced a new lineup of small form factor disk drives with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors as well as updates for 2.5-inch flash drives that were a little bit on the beefy size. We suspect that these drives were intended to be co-launched with Power9-based servers, as well as some new, skinnier flash drives that were announced just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

  On November 21, in announcement letter 117-108, Big Blue rolled out the new 2.5-inch flash drives that are based on 3D NAND flash memory and are rated at …

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• More On That Power8 Core Activation Deal

  November 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In days gone by, which unfortunately I remember very well, it was not that difficult for any of us to find out what the pricing on every single piece of hardware and software was that comprised an IBM system. The difficulty with IBM’s very sophisticated pricing databases was reckoning how the many pieces fit together to build a system.

  Pricing information for Power Systems iron is a bit harder to come by these days, and as far as I know the pricing databases that I had access to for more than two decades were re-routed to configurators that could only …

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• IBM Deal Prices Current Power8 Compute Like Future Power9

  November 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The old proverb, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” is thankfully and just a little bit humorously applicable. In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, there was a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the fact that IBM is not shipping shiny new Power9 machines here in the fourth quarter and will not until early 2018. Given that fact and that the Power8’s are very long in the tooth, we fully expect for Big Blue to cut IBM i customers some kind of deal. There is a small deal for those buying Linux-only versions of the …

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• 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. …

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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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• Advice For The Power Systems Shop That Has To Buy Now

  October 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Having to buy a new computer as one generation is ending and the new one is not quite yet beginning puts users in a tough spot. Without knowing the feeds and speeds of the system, you can’t compare what you might be giving up if you buy now. And without knowing the price of the new machine, and the current price of its predecessor that you might buy, you can’t tell how hard you have to negotiate if you buy the current model instead of the one that is coming down the pike in a few months.

  IT budgets tend …

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• Sundry October Power Systems Announcements

  October 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We had been hearing for quite some time that there might be some Power Systems announcements in October, and lo and behold there have been. They are just not what we had expected out of Big Blue.

  The big news was not related to IBM i, which just had its Technology Refresh announcements two weeks ago for the 7.2 and 7.3 releases, but rather a big update for IBM’s AIX Unix variant as well as for the PowerVM hypervisor, the PowerSC security tools, and the PowerVC implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller, which does support IBM i systems. There was …

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• Power9 Big Iron “Fleetwood/Mack” Rumors

  October 9, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, the universe just hands you a great title, like that one above. As the Power9 platform is rolling out across the field to various launch pads, with entry, midrange, and high-end systems in the works, word always inevitably leaks out about what Big Blue has planned with its future systems.

  In the case of the high-end machines, we are hearing rumors that the current top-end Power E880 and its half-pint Power E870, which went by the code-name “Brazos” within IBM, likely in deference to the river in New Mexico, will be replaced by a machine code-named “Fleetwood,” no doubt …

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• Talking Power9 With IBM Fellow Brad McCredie

  October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power8 generation is at the very end of its life, and the Power9 generation is just starting to crawl and soon will be walking and then running. IBM is a bit behind its processor rollout cadence, but that delay is not as great as the one that Intel has experienced with its recent “Skylake” Xeon SP processor launch, which was expected last September and then was held off formally until July. We had heard Power9 iron would launch in July, then in October, and now we are hearing maybe in December.

  It is unusual for there not to be …

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• The Necessity Of A Power Systems 911

  September 25, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  People are starting to talk about the future, and in some cases perhaps impending, Power9 systems from IBM and its OpenPower partners. The chatter is about machines with two, four, eight, or 16 processors, so far at least. But the one thing I am not hearing anyone talk about is an entry Power box, either with or without the Cognitive Systems label, that has a modestly configured processor complex that is suitable for the IBM i workloads in the current customer base and yet allows them to affordably and quickly expand their capacity to absorb more and more workloads in …

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