IBM tells POWER8 owners: The end is nigh for upgrades

IBM has warned owners of POWER8 servers that their upgrade options are about to become limited. A Statement of Direction document published last week states that Big Blue "intends to announce the withdrawal from marketing of MES upgrades to IBM POWER8 systems in January 2022". MES upgrades cover items such as memory, adapters …

[Lord Elpuss]

Fair enough if you bought in 2014, pretty harsh if you bought in 2019. Although then you probably got the machine a lot cheaper, and you can still stock up on spares for the next 5 years if you want.

All in all this should be a nice little earner for IBM's salesdroids in their Q4 run-up; at least if they're on commission for selling upgrades...

[Doctor Syntax]

"a nice little earner for IBM's salesdroids"

Only if it really is little. Previous reports here suggest there may be problems if it isn't.

[seven of five]

This is not about getting spares, this is about the end of upgrades delivered/installed by IBM.

Spare parts will be sold at least until EOS date. Which is not that very far away for the smaller ones, iirc 2025 for S822.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really about upgrades, not spares.

IBM is quite picky about selling hardware for products that are withdrawn from marketing.

Even if the same part is still available for later systems still being marketed, in order to buy them, you have to provide the serial number of the system you want to put it in, and as soon as it sees that it is a WFM system, it does not allow you to continue with the purchase.

A few years back, I needed to procure some Fibrechannel and Ethernet cards for a Power 7 system, which had passed the withdrawal of MES deadline, and there just seemed to be no way of doing it, even though the parts (same part MES and FRU numbers) were still available for the Power 8 systems we also had.

We considered ordering them against the Power 8 system, but they were ordered fully populated, and the online configurator knew it.

Eventually found some in a system that had been de-commissioned, and was lying around unpowered in one of the machine rooms. It belonged to the project anyway, so we ended up saving some money (although we did need to bend the rules slightly to get the boards moved. I never did the hardware authentication course, but I knew how to do it having worked alongside IBM hardware engineers for years, and it is fully documented in the HMC led procedures anyway).

[jfollows]

“Miscellaneous Equipment Specification” is what “MES” stands for, although just about as meaningless as the abbreviation …. for those unlike me who didn’t have the benefit of working for IBM for > 20 years.

[JacobZ]

Thanks

I worked in IBM for 15 years without learning that. I guess I should have stuck it out for another five.

[jfollows]

Re: Thanks

The process of generating an MES or upgrade order was one interesting part of one of the jobs I had during my 20 years.

The starting point was a representation of the current system, in some kind of electronic form. If I had myself configured and ordered the original system, I probably had this information. Otherwise it required an attempt to reverse-engineer this, and there were pitfalls for the unwary. How many power supply units does the system have? How many memory modules and of what type? And so on.

Then I used a "configurator", initially on HONE (mainframe system running VM) and later on a PC. This was something created by the real product specialists describing all the possible features and the restrictions or co-requirements for them. In the configurator I specified the desired final system, eg one with more memory or whatever.

Then the configurator was set to work and it spat out a list of things required to upgrade the system - the MES if you will. This could include additional power supplies to support the additional components, for example. WIth all my specialist knowledge, this was too detailed to remember, so having the configurator work out the rules and generate the list of required upgrades was pretty vital. It would also list any components to be removed.

Then I'd pass this to a sales person, who would do something with the pricing to ensure that it was appropriate, and feed it into the order processing systems.

The configurator didn't stop all mistakes, but prevented a lot of them. The main problem was that it wouldn't let you order what you thought you wanted, until you worked out why, and it was normally my misunderstanding which was at fault.

Presumably something similar still exists today, but I left IBM in 2008.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Thanks

When IBM started to have a presence on the Web, the configurator moved online, as so many things have.

IIRC, it was possible to import the output from "lsvpd" into the PC based configurator to avoid having to enter everything by hand.

During my time at IBM in the first half of the '90s, I was responsible for providing a mechanism for downloading the PC based configurator in the UK for those Business Associates who did not want to have to set up HONE (actually EHONE in europe) access. Ended up sitting on a system we called AIX-Connect for customers with Internet and dial up access. Was a good idea, but a nightmare to maintain, and the self-service fixes database on AIX-Connect was always out of date because of the volume of fixes published, and the limited resources we had to implement it.

I never managed to set up a completely automated method of downloading the PC based configurator from it's primary distribution location on HONE. Even using the automation available in HCON was unreliable, and I ended up having to drive ftp in 3270 mode using a convoluted expect script, and nursemaid it every week. Such were the trials trying to make AIX and VM/CMS work together.

I guess that this was all shutdown when the first IBM UK internet website was set up, but that was after I left IBM.

[Southernboy]

Externalized???

"While we have not yet externalized..."

WTF is "externalized"? How about "published'?

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Externalized???

IBM speak. There is quite a lot of it.

There's a full IBM jargon dictionary knocking around somewhere. There was even a chat-bot which allowed you to provide an IBMism, and get a more wordy description, but I don't know whether it was ever re-implemented when they shut down Sametime as the company instant messaging system.

[Robert Carnegie]

Statement Of Direction...

Do they abbreviate that? :-)