IBM Cancels Wide Series of Power6 and Power6+ Servers

The proliferation of IBM's Power7 processors throughout the company's product range has lead to the cancellation of the Power 520 or Power 550 servers, based on the older dual core Power6 or Power6+ processors, the computing giant just making the news official through an announcement letter.

The Power 520 or Power 550 server range included a wide series of models that were also used for various IBM i edition low-end packages.

These will also get dumped together with the machines, IBM planning to replace them in a short while.

“Effective April 29, 2011 , May 27, 2011, July 29, 2011, and December 30 (GCG only), 2011, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following IBM Power Systems products: IBM Power 520, IBM Power 550, IBM BladeCenter JS23/JS43 and IBM Power 595.

“On or after the effective dates of withdrawal, you can no longer order these products directly from IBM.

“You can obtain the products on an as-available basis through IBM Business Partners,” reads an IBM announcement letter regarding this move.

The withdrawn systems run IBM's AIX variant of Unix, various Linux distribution form the likes of Red Hat and Novell as well as IBM's own i5/OS V5R5, i 6.1, and i 7.1 operating system.

According to the IBM announcement letter, users who were interested in buying the machines are advised to look for other solutions, the company recommending for the JS23/JS43 to be replaced with the PS701 blade, the Power 520 with the Power 720 and the Power 550 with the newer Power 740.

In addition, shoppers who looked at a Power 595 system should turn their attention towards a Power 795 machine.

Together with these systems IBM also announced the cancellation of a wide series of processor cards, various disk drives as well as a slew of other peripherals like RIO-2 I/O adapters, DAT320 and LTO4 tape drives and cables.

Further down the line, on April 29, 2011, to be more precise, IBM also plans to remove the AIX 5.3 OS from its product catalog. (via The Register)