• Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.

  In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …

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• Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support

  April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.

  In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …

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• The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth

  March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.

  And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …

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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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• The Deal On Power9 Memory For Entry Servers

  March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a lot of changes that come with any new Power Systems platform. But perhaps the biggest change – and one that will in some ways make the Power9 platform more competitive with X86 and ARM servers and in others less competitive – is the way IBM is shifting from buffered DDR3 and DDR4 main memory used in Power8 iron to plain vanilla registered DDR4 memory that is commonly used in all servers these days.

  Buffered memory had its heyday on high-end NUMA systems, and was necessary to try to balance the needs of memory bandwidth against ever-increasing compute …

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• Cognitive Systems Hardware Business Gets A Boost

  March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As 2017 came to an end, X86 server shipments and revenues surged, and IBM’s System z14 mainframes came to market and Big Blue got a much-needed injection of revenues and profits in its Cognitive Systems hardware business.

  While IBM did start shipping some initial Power9 iron as the year came to an end, shipments are not going to start in earnest until March, when the “ZZ” entry Power Systems machines announced in February start shipping. In the quarter, and more or less consistent with what IBM said recently in its own financial reports, IDC believes that Big Blue had $2.69 …

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• IT Jungle Readers Respond To Tech Refreshes

  February 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM took some people in the IBM i community by surprise when it unveiled the latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 two weeks ago. Support for new Power9 servers obviously headlines the news, but several other notable new features are worth mentioning. We asked IT Jungle readers to chime in on the parts they liked best.

  Birgitta Hauser, a developer with Toolmaker Advanced Efficiency in Germany, says she likes the productivity enhancements that TRs bring, and the latest TRs are no different.

  “Because I’m at first an IBM i programmer, with the main focus on RPG and …

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• Inside IBM’s Power S924 Power9 Entry System

  February 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say for sure, but the two most popular Power9 machines that IBM will sell in the current and coming years will probably be the single-socket Power S914 or the two-socket Power S924. A lot depends on performance, which we don’t have metrics for yet, but one of these machines is going to be the volume leader – unless they are neck and neck.

  We flipped a coin to decide which machine to cover first, and heads was the Power S914 and tails was the Power S924, and the quarter showed the American eagle and not George …

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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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• At Long Last, IBM i Finally Gets Power9

  February 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The most important part of the Power9 rollout for the vast majority of IBM i customers has finally happened: Big Blue has lifted the veil on the Power9-based “ZZ” systems that we have been hearing about for a few months now and that are being delivered in the Power S914, Power S922, and Power S924 servers.

  These are three of the six machines based on the ZZ design, and they are the only ones that can IBM i without any restrictions. Two other machines, which are called the Power H922 and Power H924, were created explicitly to run SAP’s HANA …

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