Edit: As of the time of the writing the links still worked.
Originally posted May 11, 2015 on AIXchange
On April 28, IBM announced new capabilities for existing POWER8 servers. Today, it’s announcing a new POWER8 server model.
There is a new four-socket 4U server, the Power E850 server, machine type/model 8408-E8E, which will become generally available on June 5, 2015.
The Power E850 will support a maximum of 2 TB of memory, which is a 2X increase over the Power 750, with a statement of direction taking it to 4 TB of memory in the future. The E850 is also redesigned as a 4U server versus the 5U Power 750 and 760 that we had with POWER7+.
The E850 can have two to four processor sockets, up to 3.7 GHz. If you order a system with 2-processors, you will be able to add the third or fourth processors to the systems later if you want to with an MES upgrade, or you can populate your server with extra CPU and memory in advance to take advantage of processor and/or memory Capacity Upgrade on Demand, now available with this model.
The processor options for the E850 include up to 48 cores running at 3.02 GHz, up to 40 cores running at 3.35 GHz, or up to 32 cores running at 3.72 GHz. This server will be part of the small software tier.
The E850 will have 11 PCIe Gen3 slots, one of which will be populated by a LAN adapter of your choice; however, keep in mind that some of the slots and memory options may not be available if you do not populate all of the processor sockets. There are two x16 slots available per installed processor, and three additional x8 slots, on each system. If you populate the processors and choose to activate them later then you will have access to all of the available slots and memory.
The E850 is considered an enterprise server, with enhanced reliability features like Active Memory Mirroring for Hypervisor and Capacity Upgrade on Demand, although it will be a customer set up machine and will not be able to be part of a Power Enterprise Pool, like the E870 and E880 server are today.
The following is a list of E850 supported OS levels that I took from a chart from IBM.
If installing AIX LPAR with any I/O configuration:
- AIX V7.1 TL3 SP5 and APAR IV68444, or later
- AIX V7.1 TL2 SP7, or later (planned availability September 30, 2015)
- AIX V6.1 TL9 SP5 and APAR IV68443, or later
- AIX V6.1 TL8 SP7, or later (planned availability September 30, 2015)
If installing AIX Virtual-I/O-only LPAR:
- AIX V7.1 TL2 SP1, or later
- AIX V7.1 TL3 SP1, or later
- AIX V6.1 TL8 SP1, or later
- AIX V6.1 TL9 SP1, or later
If installing VIOS:
- VIOS 2.2.3.51 or later
If installing the Linux operating system:
-Big Endian
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, or later
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6, or later
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 and later Service Packs
-Little Endian
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, or later
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and later Service Packs
- Ubuntu 15.04
IBM is also announcing that the Power E880 server will fulfill their earlier statement of direction and now they can max out at four nodes instead of two, and a new 4 GHz clockspeed with up to 48 cores per node. Also fulfilling a previous statement of direction, the E870 now supports the larger memory 128 GB DIMMs, doubling its memory, and both the E870 and E880 may also now attach from one all the way up to four PCIe expansion drawers per node, meaning you could potentially have a four-node E880 with four expansion drawers per node, allowing for up to 192 adapters.
The E880 supports up to 192 cores at 4 GHz, or up to 128 cores at 4.4 GHz, and up to 16 TB of memory with 4 TB per node with 128 GB DIMMs. The E880 has eight PCIe adapter slots per node, along with the capability to have up to 16 PCIe I/O expansion drawers within a four-node system.
The E870 supports up to 8 TB memory, with 4 TB per node with 128 GB DIMMs. It runs up to 80 cores at 4.2 GHz or up to 64 cores at 4.0 GHz. You can order one or two nodes, which are still 5U per node, and you can have up to eight PCIe I/O expansion drawers with a two-node system, which will allow for up to 96 adapters.
With the last announcement, we were limited to either zero or two I/O drawers per E870/E880 node With this new announcement, we will now be allowed to use just one I/O drawer, along with the ability to configure one-half of an I/O drawer if necessary. The E870 supports from a half IO drawer up to four I/O drawers per E870 node; in a two-node E870 the range of I/O drawers is half to eight I/O drawers. The E880 supports from a half I/O drawer up to four I/O drawers per E880 node; in a four-node E880 the range of I/O drawers is half to 16 I/O drawers.
Both the E870 and E880 are part of the Medium software tier.
The I/O drawer can attach to all POWER8 servers:
- E880 up to 16 I/O drawers
- E870 up to eight I/O drawers
- E850 with four sockets populated up to four I/O drawers; with three sockets populated up to three I/O drawers; with two sockets populated up to two I/O drawers
- S824 with two sockets populated up to two I/O drawers; with one socket populated one I/O drawer
- S822 with two sockets populated up to one I/O drawer; with one socket populated one-half I/O drawer
The I/O drawers are supported in numerous environments with the exception of OPAL hypervisor and PowerKVM environments.
There are also enhancements to the POWER8 scale-out servers.
There will be a new processor option in the S822 and S822L, you can now order a socket with an 8 core 4.15 GHz option for a total of up to 16 cores running at 4.15 GHz. Keep in mind the maximum memory with this option is 512 GB using the 16 GB or 32 GB DIMMs only. Due to the high cooling requirements there will also be limitations around which I/O cards can be installed in the CEC vs in an external expansion drawer so keep that in mind.
The S814 will allow for up to 1 TB and the S824 and S824L will allow for up to 2 TB of memory with the 128 GB DIMM option. This DIMM is too tall to fit in the 2U machines so do not expect to see it in the 2U servers.
IBM will now support the S824L without a GPU. In the last announcement, the S824L when the GPUs were installed ran only with bare metal Ubuntu. Now you are able to get PowerVM without the GPU.
Every scale out server will be able to use I/O expansion drawers. The maximum slots on a 2U one-socket or a 2U two-socket server with one socket filled becomes 10 slots. A 2U two-socket server with both sockets filled gives us 18 slots. A 4U one-socket or a 4U two-socket server with one socket filled will have 16 slots.
A 4U two-socket server with two sockets filled will have a maximum of 30 slots.
With the S814 rack model, you can get a 900W 110V power without an RPQ. The S814 tower model has always supported 900W power supplies.
There is a statement of direction that IBM will have water cooling available for the S822 and S822L.
As more of the Linux distributions now support little endian running on Power, you will need to upgrade VIOS to 2.2.3.50, which will add support for little endian Linux LPARs running side by side with big endian Linux LPARs, AIX LPARs and IBM i LPARs for the non-L models.
This newer version of VIOS will add another digit to the numbering schemes, which signifies minipacks. This is a cleaner approach to applying PTFs compared to using ifixes where you have to install and uninstall them.
You can read more about the changes to the strategy at ibm.biz/vios_service.
This makes for quite a portfolio of POWER8 servers and options that are now available from IBM, contact your favorite IBMer or business partner, I am sure that you can find the right machine for your environment.