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 the same except they have a lot more of the I/O lanes coming off the PCI-Express 4.0 controllers being used for PCI-Express 4.0 slots instead of having some of them backcast to PCI-Express 3.0 speeds, which run at half the bandwidth per lane.

Here is how the new I/O is sliced and diced on the updated Power H922 and Power H924 machines. For machines with a single Power9 processor installed, here is the slot breakdown:

One x16 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (CAPI)
One x8 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (with x16 connectors) (CAPI)
Two x16 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots
Four x8 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (one of these slots is used for the required base LAN adapter)

And for machines with two processors, the distribution of I/O slots and lanes is different:

Three x16 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (CAPI)
One x8 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (with x16 connectors) (CAPI)
One x8 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (with x16 connectors)
Two x16 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots
Four x8 Gen4 full-height, half-length slots (One of these slots is used for the required base LAN adapter.)

We presume that like with the other enhanced Power9 servers from July, IBM has switched from NVM-Express flash drives in the M.2 gumstick format to the regular U.2 drive format, as was done with the Power S922 and Power S924 machines. And we also presume that the number of NVM-Express devices per machine has also been boosted from 5 to 14. As far as we know, there were no price changes for these machines compared to the original Power H922 and Power H924 machines. The updated Power H922 and Power H924 machines will be available on November 20.

We find in announcement letter 120-064 that IBM has shifted to denser 16 Gb DDR4 memory chips for its 64 GB and 128 GB memory cards, which should bring the price down a bit since it is easier to weld and stack fewer fatter chips onto the stick. The new memory cards are available on the Power AC922, Power L922, Power S922, Power S914, Power S924, Power H922, and Power H924 machines; a separate presentation by IBM i chief architect, Steve Will, says it is also available for the Power E950 but not the Power E980. Here is that chart:

The new memory cards cost $2,299 for the 64 GB stick, or $36 per GB, and $4,999 for the 128 GB stick, or $39 per GB.

In addition, in that same announcement, IBM has refreshed its “mainstream” flash SSDs for the Power Systems line, with one group for AIX and Linux and another group for IBM i. Here is the low-down:

Here is the breakdown on the pricing:

931 GB SAS 4k SFF2 or SFF3: $2,225, or $2.39 per GB
1.86 TB SAS 4k SFF2 or SFF3: $3,999, or $2.15 per GB
3.72 TB SAS 4k SFF2 or SFF3: $6,799, or $1.83 per GB
7.44 TB SAS 4k SFF2 or SFF3: $14,999, or $2.02 per GB

As the presentation chart says, but the announcement letter doesn’t, the drives are supposed to be less expensive than their predecessor SSDs. We are still gathering information on some new NVM-Express flash drives, and we will report on those as soon as we get it.

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