IBM Gives Temporary Reprieve For Power8 Core And Memory Activations

November 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue is pretty generous when it comes to having features for past generations of machines available for purchase, even when they are two generations back from whatever it is currently selling. But sooner or later, IBM wants to sell the new machines and it stops selling the old stuff. Even if it is only processor and memory activations on machines that are already in the field, which is the easiest sale in the world because IBM doesn’t really have to do much.

This may be the most profitable kind of sale that Big Blue does, but sooner or later, the company wants to sell new stuff for a revenue stream more than it wants to have higher profits against a revenue trickle. And it wants to get old stuff out of the field, too.

Back on September 13, in announcement letter 922-098, IBM withdrew a whole bunch of Power Systems features, some of them effective that say and some of them effective on December 30. Among the many features that were immediately withdrawn from marketing were Power8 core activations and Power8 memory capacity activations on vintage Power8 machines. Now, in announcement letter 122-128, dated October 25, IBM has changed its mind and it is now going to be selling those Power8 core and memory activations until December 31. So, if you have a Power8 machine and you want to stretch it for the next couple of years, you have six weeks to order your CPU and memory upgrades and get them turned on.

There are a few more withdrawals you need to be aware of.

In announcement letter 922-114, which came pout on October 25, IBM announced the withdrawal of the factor deconfiguration of a single core on the Power S1022 (which is model 9105-22A) and the Power S1024 (which is model 9105-42A). The withdrawal of a factory deconfiguration is a double negative and a funny thing to boot. In the same announcement, IBM say it will on April 30, 2023 withdraw the specification of AIX and Linux as the primary operating systems and on the partitions of this machine as well as PowerVM Enterprise Edition and IFL memory activations on the Power E850 (8408-E8E) and Power E850E (model 8408-44E) servers. These machines did not run IBM i, which has annoyed us from the beginning.

And finally, On November 8, in announcement letter 922-125, the ability to not install a pair of SAS RAID feature #EJ0l PCI-Express adapter cards for Power9 and Power10 machines has been withdrawn from marketing effective that day. That’s another double negative!

Language is weird, isn’t it?

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search