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IT jungle

In the computer racket, sometimes you can learn as much from what IT vendors choose to say as you can from what they don’t choose to say. All I know for sure, in my two decades of watching this complex industry, is that you have to look at as much data as you can stomach if you want to try to come out with something that even remotely approximates the truth. And so it is with the updated Power6+ lineup that came out in late April from IBM.

The first thing I noticed in looking at the announcements was how Big Blue wasn’t bragging so much about performance. More importantly, IBM didn’t even tell people that these were Power6+ machines. I had to do that, and if I hadn’t, we’d still not have known that the new Power 520 and Power 550, as well as last October’s Power 560 and Power 570, machines were based on a kicker chip to the Power6. The two are related, no doubt, and I know from looking at roadmaps that IBM was hoping at one point to have Power6+ pack about twice the wallop of Power6, and depending on who you ask, IBM was able to crank clock speeds higher earlier than expected with Power6+ or wasn’t able to crank them high enough to reach its goals. This may be why there was a dearth of competitive analysis information as part of the October 2008 and April 2009 Power6+ launches.

I remain a fan of the Power platform, check out this article talking about updates to IBM’s Power platform, it’s always interesting to know what’s going on in the different platform space, if only to know the possibilities and what’s going on in the industry.

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