IT Jungle: IBM Winds Down Older Power6 CPUs and Memory in Advance of Power8

If you’re running a Power6 machine and don’t have any plans to upgrade to Power 7+, you may want to read this article by Timothy Prickett Morgan (TPM).

Tim reports that IBM is prepping customers about impending withdrawals of Power6 CPUs and memory in advance of the upcoming Power8 announcement, including this intriguing quote from IBM’s statement of direction on Power6.

In addition, it is IBM’s intention to withdraw from marketing those features that allow the permanent activation of processor cores and memory that are currently installed but inactive on existing Power6-based servers. These new changes will take effect in the second half of 2014.

According to TPM, this could mean that IBM may not even allow Power6 owners to activate latent capacity on their boxes that they already have in-shop. This would be new behavior from IBM that might leave Power6 customers with no choice but to upgrade to new iron.

So you may want to read this article if you’re still running a Power6 machine that you’re not going to upgrade for a while. And from an earlier article by TPM, there may be an estimated 20,000+ shops with Power6 hardware. Which means withdrawing Power6 hardware and activations may affect a lot of organizations.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.