IBM euthanizes aging Power gear
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With Power6+ systems in the market and Power7 machinery slated for next year - and with IBM's supply chain expert (Bob Moffatt) in charge of its Systems and Technology Group - you can't expect older gear to stay in the product line for very long.
And so it comes as little surprise that IBM is already starting to wind down some Power6 iron. Starting July 1, IBM will stop selling 4.2 GHz Power6 processor boards and processor activations for them inside the original Power 570 server. The server made its debut in the summer of 2007. (That's the 9117-MMA box, you'll remember).
IBM also said that effective April 28, it stopped selling the iSeries Model 810, 825, 870, and 890 machines and a slew of features for these boxes (processor upgrades, disk drives, Ethernet and Token Ring adapters, and so on). You can read all the details here.
IBM also said in that announcement letter that processor upgrades within 9405-520, 9406-520, and 9406-570 machines (those are the first generation of Power6 boxes from 2007, before the i-p convergence last April) as well as many features unique to these machines were withdrawn from marketing on April 28. So were SCSI disk drives for these machines. Starting November 27, processor upgrades for 9406-525, 9406-550, and 9407-515 machines will be chopped from the product catalog, and a bunch of features for these machines as well as for the 9407-M15, 9408-M25, and 9409-M50 will be cut too.
In a separate announcement, IBM said that certain disk, memory, and backplane features of Power 520 and Power 550 machines will be removed from the product line. (These, again, are boxes that were sold prior to the i-p convergence). IBM is killing off some memory modules used with the JS22 blades too. And in yet another announcement, a slew of System p features that span the older Power6 line will be withdrawn from marketing as of August 28. The biggies are SCSI disks and SCSI disk controllers. IBM will stop selling 146.8 GB 15K RPM SCSI disks on the Power 595 on November 27.
Basically, IBM is now ready to make the full switch to SAS disks, and it'si giving System i and System p shops fair warning. ®
COMMENTS
This This is a testimonial to IBM's renowned qualtiy
Think about this. This is rather old gear they are EOLing. How many other manufactureres have to stop selling components in order to get their cusomers to upgrade to modern equipment? Not many.
@Scott Handy
So if you have them you can still get them activated and that will continue after July 1st. And if you don't have the hardware in the first place you cannot order any more of them.
That sounds a lot more reasonable.
If you already bought 'em, you can activate 'em
You can still activate any inactive processors you already have. And they did teach me 'don't be draconian' in customer value prop school. ;-) We are withdrawing some processor upgrades within a model of some of the POWER5 systems where we offered them, but if they already have processors that can be activated with Capacity on Demand (COD), that's still supported. We also stopped supporting activations during the order process (you can still however, activate the processors after you get the box), for some of the first POWER6 systems which have been superseded by newer/faster models, but again, if a client owns inactive processors on an existing Power5 or Power6 box, those are unaffected. Hope this helps! (Scott Handy, VP WW Strategy, Marketing, Sales Support - Power Systems, IBM).
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