Re: Power 550 servers

Jim Damato wrote:

<<SNIP>>

Recently I stumbled across this on the IBM page for the Power 550 Express Server: _________ Processor cores: Two, four, six or
eight(1) 64-bit 3.5 GHz or 4.2 GHz POWER6 with AltiVec(tm) SIMD and
Hardware Decimal Floating-Point acceleration

(in the footnotes:) (1) Available configuration options are dependent
on the number of processor cores, processor speed and other factors.
The IBM i operating system is supported on 2- and 4-core
configurations only. _________

Whaddya think? Is there a technical reason, or is IBM deliberately marketing the i out of the 8-core Power 550 servers?

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IMO Marketing... to keep happier, those that may otherwise have to upgrade [too soon]. If they require 3/4 to a full\maximum configuration of a larger system, they are likely to have increases in capacity requirements. Thus I think IBM is trying to push those with such higher capacity requirements, to move directly into the 570 due to its modular design, failover & redundancy, CUOD, and capacity to grow. While a typical OS for p&x may tend horizontal, i tends vertical. The 550 will presumably never grow above 8 cores, and it would seem to me only natural, that the 550 will become an effective subset of the modular 570 design. Starting with an 8-core 550 will require a hardware change to a 570 for any topped-out configurations. Discouraging such configurations up front, limits the number that would have to change to achieve vertical growth. Some may argue that the customer knows better, or is always right, but I think anyone can point to many counter examples. After continually consolidating more and more workloads, having chopped off much of their past horizontal growth, plus typical growth within any of those workloads, I am aware of several large systems that /required/ growing larger to the point of needing even more than the maximum supported number of CPU.

Regards, Chuck