• IBM Takes PowerVM And PowerVC Upscale

  August 9, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a tension between integration and generalization that Big Blue has always managed when it comes to its Power Systems and System z platforms. IBM has to support the popular open source system tools and their interfaces if it wants to keep in lockstep with the IT industry, but at the same time it has to tightly integrate that open source software with its existing stacks. Sometimes, it needs to simplify the offerings it has created itself just to make it easier on its sales force and its customers, who do not want to have to keep track of …

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• A Slew Of Power Systems Features Are Being Sunsetted

  July 17, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has long since stopped selling Power8 machinery and has been winding down sales of Power9-based systems as its Power10 machines, which made their debut in late 2021 and early 2022, are ascending. So, it is natural that features for Power8 and Power9 machinery are being withdrawn. But even some features with the newer Power10 machines are also being withdrawn, in some cases because supplies are running out and in other cases because better features have been introduced.

  You have to keep up with these things so you can get what you need before IBM stops selling whatever that …

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• IBM i Delivers Sizable Benefits, Forrester Consulting Reports

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have firsthand knowledge of the positive characteristics of the platform relative to industry-standard X86 servers. We often hear anecdotes about the platform and share them with you through these pages. But IBM would like to get beyond mere anecdotes and get to some hard numbers on the IBM i advantage. That’s when it turns to Forrester Consulting.

  According to Forrester Consulting’s latest Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, a typical IBM i customer can expect to save about $2.6 million over three years as a result of the IBM i platform’s uptime, productivity, and efficiency. The report, …

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• Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance

  June 5, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are always on the lookout for any performance tests that show the benefits of adding flash storage to Power Systems iron, and we found some recently in an NVM-Express flash drive deep drive given by Douglas Gibb’s the I/O product manager for the Power Systems line at IBM during the POWERUp 2023 conference in Denver.

  The presentation that Gibbs gave went through all of the ins and outs of flash storage on Power Systems, including those that use the NVM-Express protocol over the PCI-Express peripheral bus, which offers a direct link between the operating system and the flash storage …

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• Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM

  May 24, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Earlier this week, we told you about a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when running on Power9 and Power10 systems. IBM found the vulnerability itself and immediately set about to patch the vulnerability, which it revealed on May 17 along with patches to firmware in systems that are managed by the Hardware Management Console, or HMC.

  What was not necessarily apparent was that there are plenty of Power Systems customers who do not have HMCs managing their systems and the logical partitions upon them, and this is particularly true of the IBM i installed base, which …

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• Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM Hypervisor

  May 22, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) put out a notice on Wednesday, May 17, to inform the Power Systems installed base that there is a very serious security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor. You can see the PSIRT notice at this link and the Security Bulletin: This Power System firmware update is being released to address CVE 2023-30438 at this link. This has a CVSS base score of 9.3, which means it is critical.

  We very rarely see any security vulnerabilities being reported for the PowerVM hypervisor or for the IBM i operating system itself, for that matter, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 21

  May 22, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  As we report elsewhere in this week’s edition of The Four Hundred, there is a critical security vulnerability in the PowerVM hypervisor when it is running on Power9 and Power10 systems.

  This HIPER/Pervasive patch is described as fixing this: An internally discovered vulnerability in PowerVM on Power9 and Power10 systems could allow an attacker with privileged user access to a logical partition to perform an undetected violation of the isolation between logical partitions which could lead to data leakage or the execution of arbitrary code in other logical partitions on the same physical server.

  The Common Vulnerability and Exposure …

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• The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin

  May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.

  The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …

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• An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

  April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.

  And work, of course. …

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• Disaster Recovery: From OS/400 V5R3 To IBM i 7.4 In 36 Hours

  March 27, 2023 Jason Hardy

  Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap: Three Mistakes That Leave You Stuck that described how a series of decisions related to how you manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.

  With their busiest weekend of the year just days away, GCI, an Ohio-based company, had all …

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