IT Jungle News

IT Jungle - IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

Link :: IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

“We’re almost into the fourth quarter and just finishing up the last couple of business days in the third quarter, and that means IBM is looking to cut some deals on CPU cores and i5/OS licenses to make some dough out of the System i installed base.”

IT Jungle - IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

LINK :: IT Jungle - IBM Doubles the Cores on Midrange Power Systems

“Well, the rumor going around that IBM is doubling up the processor core counts on its Power Systems servers, which are based on the company’s dual-core Power6 processors, turns out to be true. Last Tuesday, IBM announced that it has doubled up the cores in the Power 570 to a maximum of 32, and now is also offering a 16-core box called the Power 560 that slides in underneath it in the product line. As expected, IBM also doubled the core count on entry Power 520 and midrange Power 550 machines when running the i 6.1 (formerly OS/400 and i5/OS) operating system to four and eight cores, respectively, bringing the i variants to parity with AIX and Linux boxes that shipped in April.” - IT Jungle

This is good news, more power is always good. Companies who need more CPU and more capacity are probably really happy today. This is what a midrange system today should look like and for those shops that upgraded recently to the new POWER 570, sorry, but if you wanted the best and fastest hardware you should have waited until tomorrow to purchase….

Ohh Ohh - Power 550 i Edition Versus Windows: Get Big Discounts on i Software

Link :: Power 550 i Edition Versus Windows: Get Big Discounts on i Software

 . . . The good news, however, is that the four-core JS22 blade server does a better job competing with HP’s ProLiant rack and blade servers, at least as far as I can tell from my comparisons. If you haven’t gotten the message yet, let me repeat it again: If you are an SMB shop that does not need the computing capacity provided by the Power 570, then Big Blue really, really, really wants you to consider using the blade form factor. The economics are far more favorable for configured systems, particularly when comparing the Power 550 M50 and the JS22 blade. The gap was not nearly as large when comparing the JS12 blade and the entry Power 520 servers with i Edition software.

Link :: Power 550 i Edition Versus Windows: Get Big Discounts on i Software

Look for an Interim i Release Next Year, and i 6.2 in Early 2010 - IT Jungle

Link : IT Jungle - Look for an Interim i Release Next Year, and i 6.2 in Early 2010

“As some of you know, IBM hosted two Power Systems Technical Universities in Chicago last week–one for i nerds and the other for AIX and Linux techies. As we went to press with this issue of the newsletter, some news was beginning to filter back into the cosmic ether–OK, really my email and my telephone, nothing cosmic about it–about what IBM is telling the i crowd. There’s nothing earth shattering so far, but some interesting points.

First, the Virtual I/O Server that, as the name suggests, virtualizes disk, tape, and networking I/O for JS12 and JS22 blade servers running the i 6.1 operating system apparently has some performance issues. The exact nature of the issues are not clear to me, but I have been warning you since IBM put out a spec sheet earlier this year that the I/O bandwidth on these blades might be lower than you expect–and a lot lower than equivalently powered rack and tower versions of the Power6 lineup. And this might have a lot to do with the way VIOS is doing its virtualization of I/O and how i 6.1 is interacting with this layer. The OS/400 and follow-on operating systems already had its own way of virtualizing I/O, so adding another virtualization layer underneath that could be the culprit. I dunno. The thing is, the Power blades require VIOS to run i 6.1. You can’t get around it.”

Read More here . . . Link : IT Jungle - Look for an Interim i Release Next Year, and i 6.2 in Early 2010