• 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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• IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

  August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.

  But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …

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• Big Blue Moves Up Technology Refreshes For IBM i

  August 6, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We knew that IBM was getting ready to flesh out the Power9 server lineup with the “Cumulus” processors for scale-up systems, used in machines that span from four to 16 sockets in a single system image, and we told you all about that last week for an announcement that is expected to come to pass on August 7. This is fitting with all of the rumors we heard at the beginning of the year, which expected the big iron to come in the third quarter.

  Normally, we expect Technology Refresh updates for the current versions and releases of IBM i …

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• IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

  July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …

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• IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

  July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

  In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …

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• IBM Tweaks Memory And I/O For Entry Power9 Iron

  July 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The summer is usually pretty quiet in IBM i Land, and this one is no exception. But things do still happen, and it is our job – and we like our job – to keep you informed of things when they do.

  On July 10, while IT Jungle was away on summer break, Big Blue did some tweaks and changes for various elements of the entry Power9 machines that started rolling out this year. These are all little things, but as usual, the little things can add up.

  In announcement letter 118-058, IBM has interestingly announced a new 8 …

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• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

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• IBM Hikes Memory Prices On Power8 And Power9 Iron

  June 11, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a problem that all server makers are facing: Raw DRAM and flash memory prices have been rising for the past year and a half, yet they are loath to raise their own prices because such rude spikes will actually curtail demand for servers given the sizes of the slices of the server cost pie that main memory and now flash memory comprise. When memory prices started rising at the end of 2016, most people thought it would not last for more than a few quarters, but the DRAM and flash makers are happy to make more dough doing …

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• Google Close to Launching IBM i Cloud Service, Will Says

  June 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  One of the laments of Power chip types everywhere is the lack of a public cloud service for Power applications. While Linux and Windows folks can run their X86 workloads on multiple public clouds, the opportunities for hosting IBM i, AIX, or Power Linux workloads are limited to so-called private clouds. But according to IBM i chief architect Steve Will, that could soon be changing.

  While neither IBM nor Google have made any official announcements about Google running IBM i in its public cloud, Will talked openly about the relationship between the two tech giants at COMMON‘s PowerUp conference …

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• Big Blue Gives IBM i Shops A Special 30th Birthday Bash Box

  May 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Big Blue is in the middle of celebrating three decades of the IBM i platform, and the company has unveiled a special birthday box that commemorates the occasion. It’s essentially a Solutions Edition package with some extra bells and whistles. For those unfamiliar with the Solutions Editions, they are pre-configured systems with a choice of IBM and ISV software discounts applied. Those discounts would be unavailable when buying the systems or the software individually.

  The IBM i 30th Edition offering is based on IBM i Solution Edition Power9 Model S914, a P05 tier box, with four cores. All of the …

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