Big Blue thinks small, again, with POWER tower

IBM has again teased small hardware, this time in the form of an update for its smallest POWER server. The model S1112, teased Tuesday in a customer announcement, is a 2U, single-socket POWER11 server IBM offers in rack-mountable and what the company calls “Tower/deskside configuration.” The rackable model can handle a ten-core …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

POWER

You are required to say it in Clarkson voice.....

[MaChatma CoatGPT 2.0]

512GB of DDR5 memory

We call it the Oligarch Special. They're the only ones who can afford it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"now in deskside form"...

IBM has a history of POWER, PowerPC and Power deskside systems. It's true that it hides them, and has not offered Power 8, 9 and 10 deskside systems (different form factor than the previous systems), but the 520 model of 4U Power 5, 6 and 7 all has a deskside fitting kit available to take a 4U rackmounted system, and stand it on it's end for deskside use. I have a P6 520 in a deskside unit waiting to be discarded or repaired. They're a bit noisy for an office environment, but they did exist.

Prior to this, there were numerious desktop and deskside systems going all the way back to the RS/6000 models 320 and 520 in 1990 for AIX. The Power based AS/400s came a bit later, but also had deskside packages.

So it's really a return to form rather than something new. I just hope that these new systems are priced to make them worthwhile purchases.

Nowadays, as I have reduced need for a real Power system, I run a Power 8 emulation under QEMU on a SFF x86-64 platform to get my AIX fix. Not fast, but surprisingly crash free, but then it takes up much less space, is quieter, and I'm not doing any production work on it. I do miss the rumble of a real Power system a little, though.

Anon, as I don't think there is a licensing model for AIX under emulation!

[Sunset]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

Not really a "return to form" - the S1012 was offered as a tower too, and the S1112 uses the exact same form factor options as the S1012 did. (Power11 as a whole is basically a minor refresh of Power10, so that's not really surprising.)

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

That's interesting. I don't think I ever saw a deskside kit for a Power 8 or later system on any of the IBM product lists. But I must admit that even though I have access, I hadn't been keeping up with all of the ulet announcement letters that come out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

There were even Power Thinkpads which never sold well and were discontinued when the chips went to 64-bit. I used to work at Greenock and kept hoping to get my hands on a remaindered model to practice AIX on.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

They were discontinued long before 64 bit chips. IIRC they had Power 603e processors in them, and the latest version of AIX that would run was AIX 4.1.5.

At the AIX Systems Support Centre in the mid-80s, we had a number of Thinkpad Power Series 850 systems that went home with the out-of-hours support people so that they had access to AIX documentation on CD (this was before IBM put the documentation on-line, and the format of the documents on CD only had an AIX reader), They were quite good for the time, although they were much larger and heavier than their Intel counterparts. I remember getting about 2.5-3 hours of use out of the internal battery. The one thing I did find was that the PCMCIA modems that IBM sold used to fail very quickly, so we had to resort to external modems to dial back into the centre's computers to get access to other resources.

[David 132]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

At the AIX Systems Support Centre in the mid-80s, we had a number of Thinkpad Power Series 850 systems

Mid-90s, possibly?

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

Yes. My bad.

[Dom 3]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

PowerPC != POWER

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: "now in deskside form"...

Yes again.

But as an aside POWER (original RIOS systems) != Power (as in Power 10 et. al.) as well! There's been so many changes in architecture and branding across the years that sometimes one makes mistakes.

I remember the confusion when the the single-ship RSC POWER implementation, as in the 220 and C10 were launched, and people called them PowerPC by mistake.

[Sunset]

Smaller than typical 2U

It's not mentioned in the article, but - like the S1012 before it - the S1112 is a half-wide system, so you can fit two of them in 2U. (It's a fairly weird form factor for an enterprise server.)

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Smaller than typical 2U

For S and L models, the clue is in the name. The last digit is the number of U's of rack space it occupies. The one before that indicates the number of sockets, and anything before that is the power generation. The letter in the front indicates Scale-Out (S), Linux (L) or Enterprise (E). The numbers for the E systems do not indicate the number of sockets or rack space, but align to older system sizes such as E1050 and E1080.

Scale-Out systems have significant CPU and memory resource, but limited I/O slots for adapters. They are intended to be used where a service scales sideways over many systems, such as Cloud type deployments. The Enterprise systems have more I/O slots and can have more memory and CPUs, and the largest can be built up in a modular fashion to create very much larger single systems.

So S1112 is a Scale-Out Power 11 system with one socket in a 2U enclosure.

Generally speaking there are equivalent S and L models, with different firmware which dictates how you control and configure virtual machines and resources. The L models are a little cheaper, but significantly limit the number of AIX and IBM i partitions you can run.