IBM Pulls The Plug On Some More Power Iron

April 21, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power8 server announcements have been on the horizon since last August, when IBM first started giving out details about the chips that will be at the heart of the new systems. Since that time, as is usual, IBM has been warning customers that it will be withdrawing some older iron from its sales catalog, and it did so again recently.

In announcement letter 914-055, selected features will be withdrawn from marketing through the summer and into the fall.

On July 11, the BladeCenter PS700, the entry single-socket blade server that was aimed predominantly at IBM i shops back in early 2010 when it debuted, will no longer available. (That’s 8406-70Y in the catalog.) Ditto for the Power7-based Power 780, which goes by the name 9179-MHC in the catalog. RISC-to-RISC data migration features will also be no longer available for that Power 780, and the ability to load IBM i Express Edition for the BladeCenter PS700 will also be unavailable at that time. The PCI-Express two-line WAN link with modem (feature 2893) will no longer be sold for a slew of machines after July 11. The same holds true for a bunch of legacy SCSI and SAS disk controllers, Ethernet adapters, Fibre Channel adapters that were available for Power5, Power5+, and Power6 iron. Earlier generations of solid state drives used with the Power6+ and Power7 machines are also being phased out because they have long-since been replaced with better, faster, and cheaper components.

On August 1, interestingly, the Express Edition of the PowerVM hypervisor will no longer be available on smaller machines in the earlier generations of the Power Systems lineup. I am not sure why this is the case, but I have a feeling that IBM will be promoting the use of the Power-based version of KVM on future entry Power8 machines and it wants a stick as well as a carrot to get customers to move off old iron and onto shiny new metal. But, IBM just wants customers to move to more recent PowerVM Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

On October 31, the 7042-CR7 Hardware Management Console is no longer available. IBM obviously has other management consoles for administering its PowerVM hypervisor, so fear not. You can’t get rid of the HMC that easily. . . .