Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Boston Power9s Set To Debut
May 14, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Power9 systems aimed at data ingest and data analytics, code-named “Boston” after the band from Beantown that features what is arguably the tightest album side in classic rock music, are now out and will be available by the end of the month. These are Linux-only machines, and like some of the prior LC models (short for Linux Cluster, not Low Cost as I keep thinking it means) based on Power8 processors, these were created by Supermicro and are resold by IBM as well as being sold by Supermicro in its SuperServer line.
IBM is, of course, Supermicro’s biggest customer …
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IBM Wheels And Deals To Boost Power System Sales
May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A lot of the revenue that comes to the Power Systems division – and perhaps the bulk of it if history and the changed nature of the product line is any guide – comes from relatively big iron machines, at least by IBM i standards for what is little, middle, and big iron. And IBM needs to do something here in early 2018 to keep customers of big iron boxes investing while it prepares to ship machines with four sockets or more of the Power9 processors under a schedule that we told you about back in February and that seems …
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Spring Cleaning In IBM i Land
May 7, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has been a busy couple of weeks with IBM winding down a whole bunch of different products related to the IBM i platform. It is a kind of spring cleaning, we suppose. IBM doesn’t usually offer explanations for its decision to discontinue products, so we just have to take them at face value. Sometimes there are upgraded or replacement products, and sometimes it is just the end of the line.
In announcement letter 918-056, IBM says that it will be withdrawing the 7042-CR9 Hardware Management Console (HMC), and moreover, IBM says that going forward, support for the Model …
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Sundry IBM Announcements For Power Systems
April 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a quiet time in the Power Systems line, with the “ZZ” entry Power9 machines just announced in February and shipping in March and other machines not expected until the third quarter. But there are always some little things happening here and there, and you keep us around so we catch wind of them and report them to you.
First up, in announcement letter 118-036, IBM is offering new processor features and memory sticks for the Power H922 and Power H924 systems that are designed primarily to run the SAP HANA in-memory database on Linux atop Power, but …
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Power Systems Posts Growth In The First Quarter
April 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have been waiting for four long years for the Power9 ramp to begin in earnest, and the merest hint of it happened Big Blue finished off its first quarter. That was when the “ZZ” Power9 entry systems announced back in February finally started shipping and IBM finally started booking some revenue for this new iron.
IBM did not provide much in the way of information about the Power9 system sales in the first quarter ended in March, which was only a week and a half after the ZZ systems started shipping. Jim Cavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer for the …
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The Platform Matters More Than Ever, The Operating System Less So
April 16, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Those of us who have been in the IBM midrange for three or four decades are so used to thinking about systems and application platforms for so long it is hard to remember that this sort of thinking is fairly new to the rest of the IT community that did not grow up on proprietary mainframes or midrange gear. Platforms matter more than ever and continue to evolve, but that core operating system – the basic kernel that runs on a processor and has some management features on it – is changing very slowly.
This is not a bad thing. …
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Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.
In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …
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What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.
The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …
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Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3
April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.
IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …
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Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support
April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.
In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …
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