Last week IBM hosted Recarta at their quarterly “Power-up live” event – this time at the infamous Hursley laboratories – the working offices to 29 master inventors from IBM.
A great deal of time was spent outlining the role of IBM Power and how it is aiming to compete with Intel into the data centre. This will be an interesting battle over the next couple of years as IBM continue to challenge the traditional software licensing models with high performance, open source servers.
To those of you wondering whether IBM are due to announce an upgrade to your existing server line up this year the answer was “no”! IBM will be shipping POWER9 servers to some of their key contracted accounts – one being Google. However, IBM will not be shipping a commercial offering around POWER9 servers until early 2018. We expect this to be a lower-end POWER9 scale out servers. Good news for all those of you planning to upgrade your IBM Power server this year without distractions of any new announcements.
Even better news is that IBM POWER10 and IBM POWER11 processor technologies are in the roadmap, with little details being offered at this stage. It is comforting to know that the IBM Power server with its Power processor remain an important investment within IBM.
If you are considering upgrading your IBM Power environment and would like to speak to a qualified expert. Please call us on +(0)844 800 7821.