• 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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• 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 …

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• Why Not Overclock Power Chips For IBM i?

  August 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Remember way back in 2000, when Intel, the world’s largest chip manufacturer and now the world’s dominant supplier of processors in the datacenter, said that it would be able to deliver processors that run at 10 GHz by 2011. Well, that was six years ago, and that sure as hell did not happen then and it is not going to happen now. But if anyone can crank the clocks high on a processor, it is IBM with its Power and System z engines, and we think it can push them a little higher and give certain customers who …

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