Rumors have been swirling about new POWER9 servers for months, and on February 13, IBM came through on their promise to roll out the POWER9 technology into the scale-out processing community.
You can check out everything that was announced here.
With these announcements, we will have IBM i and AIX solutions along the lines of the current POWER8 solutions, but at higher capacity per core. For my folks in the IBM i community, I believe the S914 and S924 systems will be particularly interesting.
From an IBM i perspective, they will support running V7.2 or V7.3 at the newly announced technology refresh level. So, if you’ve already made the suggested move up from IBM i V7.1 (or those other earlier versions), you are well prepared to move to POWER9 technology.
If you haven’t yet upgraded from V7.1, perhaps you should read my blog post about moving on.
No performance data is available yet, but we can expect to be able to model these well before the March 20 availability date.
The new technology refresh even provides benefits if you’re not moving to POWER9, so it’s worth moving to:
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/6/897/ENUS218-126/index.html&lang=en&request_locale=en
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/5/897/ENUS218-125/index.html&lang=en&request_locale=en
If you are looking at ways to improve your scale-out Power System environment, these new POWER9 offerings are worth reviewing. Fill out the form below and an LRS IT Solutions expert can help you determine if the new systems can help.
About the author
Paul Lesle is our Power Systems Technical Team Lead and has been involved in activities including evaluating specific client requirements and recommending solutions, evaluating current system performance, performing installation readiness reviews, and implementing IBM server solutions. He has taken the lead in designing a wide range of solutions for customers’ IT infrastructure needs.