• Sundry Power Systems Enhancements Round Out The Year

  October 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the fall – autumn if you speak formally as my British friends do – and that means Big Blue has some peripheral announcements to make to finish up the 2018 season.

  In announcement letter 218-346, perhaps the most important development is that the PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor has a new update, V3.1, that supports the Power9 processor. We would have thought that this had happened already, way back when the first Power9 iron was announced back in February, but go figure. It may be that this release of PowerVM is the first one that is tuned to …

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• 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 …

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• 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, …

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• The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.

  This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …

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• 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 …

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• IBM’s Own Positioning Of Power Systems Revealed

  September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We don’t get a lot of data about how the Power Systems business is doing out of Big Blue these days, and we get even less, in terms of specifics, about the markets that IBM is chasing and how well or poorly it thinks it is doing in this regard. We get a snippet here and there from the quarterly results, we get some insight from the quarterly market trackers from IDC and Gartner, but not much else.

  Digging around through some documents relating to the Power9 rollout, we stumbled across a few interesting charts that gives us at least …

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• IBM Tweaks Power Iron, Pulls Software, Adds Proactive Support

  September 17, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue announced the “ZZ“ Power9 entry systems back in February, the “Boston” entry machines in May, and the midrange “Zeppelin” and high-end “Fleetwood” machines in August, which is the full product line. But IBM is still nipping and tucking the product line as customers react to it and want slightly different things than what initially came out with the systems.

  In announcement letter 118-079, IBM made a few tweaks that will be interesting to IBM i shops. First of all, the mainstream Power S924 system, a 4U rack or tower system with two Power9 processors, …

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• 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 …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 22

  August 22, 2018 Dan Burger

  Power9 continues to grab headlines this week, inside and outside the Jungle, as the number crunchers continue to wonder if IBM’s latest release will result in continued good fortune (and good revenue reporting) for Big Blue. AI also stays on the hot topic list, bringing up some interesting (and maybe scary) theories for the future. But using data to your advantage can pay off big dividends and recruiters are starting to look for new ways to find the right talent for the job (think: Moneyball). Surprisingly COBOL popped up on our news radar this week with a refreshing look at …

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• 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 …

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