What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At

May 20, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you know full well by now, we have a new and final entry into the Power10 line of systems from IBM, the Power S1012, also known by its codename “Bonnell.” The Power S1012 entry server was announced two weeks ago and we did an architectural dive into the system last week based on the announcement letter and the Redbook on the system.

After digging around a bit, this week we are going to do a comparative analysis on the Power S1012 machine compared to its predecessors, particularly the Power8-based Power S812 Mini machine from 2017, which was a similar lower cost, lower powered offering, and the Power S914. There never was a Power S912 Mini in the Power9 lineup, and IBM has told us unequivocally that there will not be a Power11 Mini. So if you are going to buy an extreme entry or edge machine in the next five years or so, then the Bonnell box is probably the one you will buy.

“Actually, we have positioned the S1012 such that a lot of entry IBM i customers should move into this machine – and we are happy with that,” Steve Sibley, vice president and business line executive for IBM Power, tells The Four Hundred. “So if they don’t need the extra features of the S1014, then they should buy this. That is why we designed it. If it fits in the spec, this is what we want them to buy. That’s why we built it. I have tried to shift away from our team thinking that they need to figure out how to upsell. We need to position our products where our clients need them and get them to be current. I would much rather that they be current.”

Amen. But that strategy also leads to a certain amount of downshifting to less expensive machinery.

“If you think about it,” adds Daniel Goldener, who is worldwide product manager for IBM Power and who works for Sibley in a role that the latter had for many years, “if our approach was to avoid customers scaling down, we would just not announce the system.”

Fair enough.

Here is a good table that shows the feeds and speeds of the Power S914, the Power S1022s and Power S1014, and the new Power S1012, all compared to each other:

That font is a little small for most of our eyes, so click to enlarge.

The interesting thing in this table is that IBM says that Live Partition Mobility, which the announcement letter and Redbook say is not available, is planned for later availability so you can do live migration of PowerVM logical partitions.

We also want to be able to compare this Power S1012 to the older Power8-based Power S812 Mini and Power S814, and so we are dragging a comparative table out of the announcement for the Power S812 Mini from more than seven years ago:

The Power S812 had the same 64 GB memory cap for the single-core variant of the machine, just as does the Power S1012. But the Power S812 Mini also had a cap of a maximum of 25 IBM i users, and as far as we know, there is no such user cap for the Power S1012. The Power S812 Mini was limited to a single partition and came in a 2U form factor with eight disk drive bays. The Power S1012 has a lot more oomph, of course, being two generations later on the processor and, in fact, the Power10 processors used in the Power S1012 have some yield tweaks that are giving them a tiny bit more oomph than the Power10 processors used in the existing Power10 entry machines.

Just like the Power S812 Mini and the Power S814, the Power S1012 does not support PCI-Express expansion drawers, but we will point out the obvious: With only half of a 2U rack form factor being used for the Bonnell compute sled, the other half of that rack space could be used for external PCI-Express storage. Entry IBM i shops are going to need more storage in the P05 tier, we think.

What about performance? Well, we have some feeds and speeds on that, based on IBM’s Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) benchmark test, which is commonly used to measure relative performance across the Power Systems line running OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i. Take a look:

At 29,000 CPWs, the single-core version of the Power10 processor used in the Power S1012 has 3.1X the performance of the single-core Power8 processor used in the Power S812 Mini, which is rated at 9,360 CPWs. But perhaps equally importantly, at 29,000 CPWs, the Power S1012 has 77.5 percent of the performance of the four-core Power S814. In other words, if you actually are not using all of the capacity of four cores on the Power S814, you can move from a P10 tier in the Power S814 down to a P05 tier in a Power S1012 and save a whole lot of IBM i licensing money.

Core for core, moving up to the Power S1012 will give a lot more headroom for future application and database growth for those who are on Power9 iron, too.

One thought on “What, And Who, The New Power S1012 Server Is Aimed At”

ema tissani says:

May 21, 2024 at 4:29 am

Thanks for the coverage. Yes, 4U machine are IMHO too big (even physically for rack occupation) for many shops just running a physical, many times single processor, IBMi OS instance natively (with no need of VIOS or scale).
These 2U machines make sense for those cases, but I would give them even more RAM e storage possibilities, uncapping them, to be perfect.

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