Power Systems Announcements and NEW Extended Support for AIX 5.3

May 20th, 2016

Ron Gordon
Director – Power Systems

IBM announced the end of extended support for AIX 5.3, beginning April 30, 2016.   With that announcement, they also announced a new extended support option if the AIX 5.3 applications were moved to POWER8 systems.  This week, IBM made a change to their support statement for AIX 5.3 in the following way: “For clients who continue to need support beyond 4/30/2016, options are now available through IBM Digital Sales. For pre-Power 8 hardware, Usage and Known Defect Only, post life cycle support may now be quoted through 6/30/2017. New fix support for pre-Power 8 may possibly be approved on a case by case basis. For Power 8 hardware, Usage, Known and New Defect, post life cycle support is available through 6/30/2017.”  This should be good news for customers who are on POWER7, or previous technology levels, who could not migrate to POWER8 systems.

IBM also made several announcements on April 12, 2016 regarding new capabilities.  They included:

  • New SSD options including a new Read-Intensive 1.9 TB SSD in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factor
  • New NVMe (aka Flash) on a PCIe adapter with 1.6 and 3.2 TB capacity providing 2.5x to 4x performance over SSDs
  • The Enterprise 850 now supports the 128 GB DDR4 DIMMS
  • New PCIe Gen 3 12 GB cache RAID SAS adapter
  • Power Enterprise Pools can now be managed by multiple HMCs

Please contact me or your Mainline AE with any questions.  You may also go to www.mainline.com or call 866-490-MAIN(6246).

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