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Some Power9 Tweaks And Withdrawals

September 20, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a very rare announcement cycle where IBM announces a new machine and does not offer some tweaks to or withdrawals for older machinery. And, as we always expect, Big Blue did both as part of the September 8 IBM i and Power E1080 server announcements.

In announcement letter 121-052, IBM made some tweaks to the NVM-Express U.2 form factor solid state flash drives for the Power9 entry, midrange, and high end servers. The new U.2 flash drives have an 800 GB capacity and are aimed at AIX and Linux partitions that have 4K block sizes. These drives …
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How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

November 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the NVM-Express protocol, a storage overlay for the PCI-Express peripheral bus that allows flash to be addressed in a parallel fashion as flash in its own right and not as emulated disk storage using a SATA or SCSI protocol, the idea is to get those vintage storage drivers out of the way and let the operating system kernel speak directly to the flash. This is done so the impressive – and seemingly always growing – I/O bandwidth of flash can actually be brought to bear to speed up applications.

Flash in general, and NVM-Express flash in particular, has been …
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IBM Revamps Entry Power Servers With Expanded I/O, Utility Pricing

July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Believe it or not, but it has been two and a half years since the first Power9 server shipped and it has been more than two years since the entry Power Systems machines – that would be the Power S914, the Power S922, and the Power S924 machines, code-named “ZZ” after the country-rock-blues band from Houston – were first announced. And today, these machines are getting an I/O makeover.

And specially for IBM i shops, IBM is rolling out a single-core version of the Power S922 that will offer better bang for the buck as well as lower acquisition cost …
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Big Blue Makes Moves To Mainstream Db2 Mirror

May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM brought out its active-active Db2 for i database clustering extensions, called Db2 Mirror appropriately enough, almost exactly a year ago to improve the resiliency of databases and therefore the applications that run atop them on the IBM i platform, we had a few asks. As part of the April Technology Refresh announcements for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, some of those asks are answered and it looks like another one might be in the works.

The two most important things that we asked for are related, and it is all about making Db2 Mirror available and affordable for …
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The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i

November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A couple of weeks ago, buried in the October Power Systems announcements, we told you about the new NVM-Express flash cards that Big Blue brought to the Power iron and that are specifically enabled in the IBM i 7.4 release with Technology Refresh 1, or TR1. We didn’t have a lot of detail back then about the new drives other than some capacities and pricing, but we know more now and we are going to tell you what we know.

We will circle back with Big Blue and have a discussion about what the addition of NVM-Express flash means – …
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Some Power9 Tweaks And Withdrawals

How Much Does NVM-Express Flash Really Boost IBM i Performance?

IBM Revamps Entry Power Servers With Expanded I/O, Utility Pricing

Big Blue Makes Moves To Mainstream Db2 Mirror

The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i

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