• IBM Doubles Up Memory And I/O On Power Iron To Bend The Downturn

  May 18, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early January, before the coronavirus pandemic had kicked in outside of Wuhan, China, Big Blue decided to rejigger the pricing on the memory and flash storage used in the current Power8 and Power9 systems lineup. Small form factor flash drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 7 percent, fatter SAS drives had a price increase of 6 percent to 14 percent, and on some machines they went down 10 percent. NVM-Express flash cards had price decreases of 16 percent to 27 percent. Main memory prices were cut anywhere from 2.4 percent to 18.5 percent, with the …

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• Sundry Systems Software And CoD Power Systems Announcements

  May 4, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is a steady drumbeat of new stuff that always comes out of IBM for the Power Systems hardware platform, and sometimes it is Big Blue banging on the big kettle drum and sometimes it is using the brushes on the little snare drum.

  Now that IBM owns Red Hat, we can expect for IBM to be making a certain amount of noise every time a piece of Red Hat technology becomes available on Power and demonstrates that both Red Hat and IBM – which have two distinct cultures as well as announcement streams – are committed to the idea …

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• FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

  February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

  Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …

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• IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.

  This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …

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• The Skinny On NVM-Express Flash And IBM i

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A couple of weeks ago, buried in the October Power Systems announcements, we told you about the new NVM-Express flash cards that Big Blue brought to the Power iron and that are specifically enabled in the IBM i 7.4 release with Technology Refresh 1, or TR1. We didn’t have a lot of detail back then about the new drives other than some capacities and pricing, but we know more now and we are going to tell you what we know.

  We will circle back with Big Blue and have a discussion about what the addition of NVM-Express flash means – …

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• Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

  April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

  As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …

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• Tweaking Systems And Withdrawal Symptoms

  March 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A system product line does not always come out finished and complete, all at once, and its retirement from the sales catalog and the field is not always a simple and smooth thing, either. After a certain amount of criticism from its largest customers, Big Blue last year decided that it would get a little bit more orderly about the latter, as machines are withdrawn from marketing and eventually support. As for the former, well, there are always some nips and tucks that are done here and there as parts of the system are tweaked to meet specific customer demands. …

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