Perhaps we should be thankful that IBM's new Power i announcements last month didn't have quite the same fanfare as in days gone by. This time last year, the i community was getting to grips with Power Systems convergence. Now that there's not much sign of any similar initiatives looming on the horizon, it's pretty much back to business as usual for Big Blue's midrange users. As such, on April 28 we heard about new POWER 6+ models, the introduction of solid state drives, two new BladeCenter servers and some new DB2 Web Query developments.

As it happens, my sources at IBM tell me that the corporation has been shifting the way it releases new product development news. We can expect to see huge chunks of new announcements spanning more technologies issued less often than before. There were, for instance, a slew of major System z mainframe announcements made at the same time as those covering Power Systems.

The devil, as always, is in the detail, so here's a blow-by-blow round-up of the latest Power i developments with links to IBM's official Europe, Middle East and Africa announcement letters.

First up, we have new POWER6+ processors for the model 520 and 550 Express servers. The new Power 520 features a 2-core 4.7 GHz processor with four memory slots and a new 4-core 4.7 GHz processor with eight memory slots. The Power 550 gets a new 5.0 GHz processor with eight memory slots. The same announcement letter also introduces new 2.5-inch and 2.5-inch 69 GB solid state drives for the 520 and 550 Express.

The introduction of solid state technology is significant. True, the drives don't come as standard. And there may not be many customers today that will jump at the chance of improving performance bottlenecks with the microsecond read/write capabilities of solid state disk compared to the millisecond operations of conventional spinning hard disk drives. But there's no doubt that many engineers in computing today firmly believe that solid state is the way forward. Some within IBM reckon that the rate of adoption of solid state drives by corporations will overtake that of storage-area networks and serial ATA drives.

According to IBM, solid state drives have more than just performance advantages. They have no moving parts, thus increasing their reliability, no motor and need far less electrical power or cooling than disk drives. Unlike hard disk drives that are often run at 50% or less of their storage capacity to help maintain consistent performance, their solid state counterparts can be run closer to 100% storage capacity and still provide excellent performance.

You can read more about how solid state drives work with the rest of the Power Systems range in this announcement letter. The notice also includes the full details on expanded configuration options and I/O performance enhancements. These include new 12X I/O drawers, new PCIe adapters and a new large cache disk adapter. There is also the lowdown on hot-swap small-form factor drive bays on the Power 520, 550, and "refreshed" DVD options on the 520, 550, 560 and 570.

Another highlight was the debut of the new JS23 and JS43 Express blades. The BladeCenter JS23 is a 4-core, 4.2 GHz POWER6 processor-based blade with L3 cache which can be doubled up to make an 8-core BladeCenter JS43. The JS23 blade supports up to 64 GB of memory and one disk drive and the BladeCenter JS43 supports up to 128 GB of memory and two disk drives. They both work in supported in the BladeCenter S and BladeCenter H chassis. There are a bunch of new I/O adaptor, storage and licensing options to contend with, all of which are listed here.

IBM is also expanding the scope of its Temporary Software Licence for i which gives users the option to activate extra processing power to temporarily increase workload capacity during migrations of applications and workload peaks. Licences may be purchased in monthly increments of one to 12 months. You can now also renew Red Hat Enterprise Linux licences for Power Systems direct from IBM instead of Red Hat itself and retro-fit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for POWER by ordering direct from IBM too, as per this announcement.

On the software front, DB2 Web Query for i users will no-doubt be relieved to see the debut of DB2 Web Query Adapter for Microsoft SQL Server and DB2 Web Query Spreadsheet Client. One gets the impression that Big Blue might be understating things when it says: "Many IBM i customers have the majority of their data in DB2 for IBM i but occasionally want to get real-time access to data in an SQL Server database for reporting purposes." Similarly, DB2 Web Query Spreadsheet Client's enhanced capabilities for users of Microsoft Excel 2002 onwards should also prove to be a boon. You can get the full lowdown here.

IBM has withdrawn support for the 810, 825, 870 and 890 iSeries servers, seven or so years after they first debuted. You can read their full obituary and a list of their newly-retired features here. On a lighter note for users of "older" gear, however, IBM has added SAS disk drive and smart Fibre Channel IOA support for POWER5/POWER5+ systems which you can check out here.