• The Power10 Machines That Will Take IBM i To 2025

  July 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that have been waiting for an upgrade path that will take them to the other half of this decade do not have to wait any longer. Finally, after a change of foundry (to Samsung) and process technology (from 10 nanometers down to 7 nanometers) as well as a new implementation of the Power instruction set packed with all kinds of vector and matrix math goodies that are perfect for embedding AI into commercial applications, Big Blue is ready to start shipping the entry and midrange Power Systems machines based on the Power10 processor.

  We made it, despite …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

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• IBM Refreshes Power Systems Flash Drives, Slashes Prices

  December 6, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The cost for flash storage keeps coming down, and IBM is moving to new mainstream and enterprise flash SSDs that are offering the same capacity, better performance, and a lot lower pricing compared to prior generations of flash devices – including those that were just announced a year ago.

  In announcement letter 121-084, we see that the new mainstream 2.5-inch solid state drives plug into Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines as well as the Power E950 and Power E980 – all using Power9 chips – and the …

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• IBM Unveils New FlashSystem Storage Arrays

  February 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week took the wraps off three new FlashSystem storage devices, including the enterprise-oriented FlashSystem 5200 as well as two entry-level offerings, the FlashSystem 5015 and 5035. All three devices make use of speedy NVMe flash drives in the primary enclosure, but can be outfitted with traditional spinning and less-speedy solid state drives (SSDs) in the expansion enclosures.

  Since early 2020, IBM has been phasing out its Storwize disk array line and emphasizing the FlashSystem line that replaces it. As part of that exercise, IBM renamed existing arrays, including the Storwize V5100, which became the FlashSystem 5100. It also …

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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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• Tweaks To Power System Iron Complement TR Updates

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in July, IBM upgraded the peripheral I/O on several of its Power9-based servers with more PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth capacity, and now IBM is offering the increased bandwidth on several machines tuned up for running SAP HANA in addition to making a number of other hardware enhancements and withdrawals.

  In announcement letter 120-054 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H922, a two-socket, 2U server, and in announcement letter 120-055 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H924, a two-socket, 4U system. As far as I can tell, the machines are essentially …

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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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• 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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• Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

  As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …

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• Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future.

  There are many …

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