IBM Power i Hardware Announcements Coming on February 5th

Tim Prickett Morgan has an idea on what could be in the February 5th announcement. At the very least, I’m expecting Power7+ versions of the 710, 720, 730, 740, and 750 machines.

If they come, I’d also guess that they’d have the same capabilities as the revamped Power7 710, 720, 730, and 740 machines launched in October, including PCI-Express 2.0 and doubled main memory. It just makes sense to me that at the very least, that these capabilities would be in any new POWER7+ box.

It would also be interesting if IBM would announce something new in the Pure Systems line for Power i users. But for me that would only be nice, rather than mandatory as I believe the IBM i world is probably still a few years and technical reasons away from embracing Pure Systems for IBM i processing.

Also on my wish list, I’d like some clarity on whether IBM i 6.1 will run on any new Power7+ 710+, 720+, 730+, etc. machines. I know a lot of vendors who say customers should just bite the bullet and go to i 7.1 but there are a lot of reasons, especially the need to upgrade third-party software that are keeping people on i 6.1 for now. So it would be nice if IBM offered an option for running the i 6.1 operating system on any new hardware. I’ve heard rumors both ways, so it would be nice to hear from IBM what their policy is on i 6.1 support on Power 7+ machines.

Anyhow, Tim Prickett Morgan is a whole lot smarter than I am on reading the tea leaves here. So I’ll leave it to him to explain better. Check out his article by clicking here.

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