Some More Power Systems Stuff Swept Into The Dustbin

March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the Power10 machines starting to come out later this year, the Power9 machines in the field for three years or so depending on the make and model, and the Power8 machines looking long in the tooth (but still technically and economically viable), you have to expect that Big Blue will wind down the sale of more and more older features.

In announcement letter 923-035, IBM has done just that. Nothing too big, but we think you need to be made aware of it just the same. And as you might expect, IBM also put a plug into the announcement for its Global Asset Recovery Services (GARS) division, which takes old gear in trade when IBM does upgrade deals for Power Systems customers and recertifies the parts and remanufactures systems. So if you need some of the hardware features, you can always go to GARS and for a while at least they will probably have inventory.

On March 23, which means last week when the announcement was actually made, the RDX USB external docking station for removable disk cartridges, which attaches to a slew of Power Systems iron and which replaced quarter-inch cartridge tape drives as the backup device of choice for a lot of small and midrange IBM i shops, was removed. This is feature code #EU04 on these Power Systems machines. A bundle of SAS Institute’s Viya analytics software for Linux and its SAS Grid analytics software for AIX for Power Systems was also removed, and so was using older small form factor flash drives (387 GB, 775 GB, and 1.9 TB SFF-3 SSDs to be precise) as the load source on selected Power9 iron. There are obviously alternatives.

On April 29, the 7316-TF4 rack-mounted flat panel console kit for managing racks of Power Systems servers is getting the axe. This console, which includes virtual keyboard, mouse, and video (KVM, the other KVM that is not Kernel Virtual Machine and not part of the Red Hat stack) links into the servers, was part of a whole bunch of preconfigured systems, such as the Pure App and PurePower racks, the PureFlex Systems Express, the custom supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, the Power Cloud Integrated Solution, and the Balanced Warehouse Solution.

On June 30, some FDR InfiniBand cables and SAS cables are being mothballed, and so is the feature #EJ32 PCI-Express 3.0 crypto coprocessor. The following features are also getting the boot:

Feature #EN0A PCI-Express 3.0 16 Gb/sec 2-port Fibre Channel adapter
Feature #EN0B PCI-Express 3.0 16 Gb/sec 2-port Fibre Channel LP adapter
Feature #ESJ0 931 GB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJ1 931 GB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJ2 1.86 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJ3 1.86 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJ4 3.72 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJ5 3.72 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJ6 7.45 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJ7 7.45 TB SAS 4k SSF-2 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJ8 931 GB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJ9 931 GB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJA 1.86 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJB 1.86 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJC 3.72 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJD 3.72 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for IBM i
Feature #ESJE 7.45 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for AIX/Linux
Feature #ESJF 7.45 TB SAS 4k SSF-3 SSD for IBM i

Load source specify codes for these drives is also being removed for new systems.

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