I would suspect, now that IBM has enhanced the range of Power 8 models,
that IBM sees no need to continue marketing new Power 7 machines. Or, why
should people upgrade to new Power 7's when Power 8's are out? This frees
up manufacturing to producing only one line of hardware.
As far as the processor activation goes, if it means what I think it does,
then you should pony up and activate those additional processors before
then, or plan on leaving them dormant. Although I don't see why they
would do that. Maybe they meant they won't be selling any more physical
processor upgrades.
We skipped Power 7 and upgraded from Power 6 to Power 8.
Upgrading from Power 6, and upgrading to 7.2 is what killed most of our
old hardware (actually all except some tape libraries we've recently
upgraded). I don't think upgrading to Power 8 from Power 7, keeping the
same OS level, killed that much hardware. Granted, I don't think Power 8
supports 6.1 but if you still need to run on that you have some serious
issues.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=ssm1platformibmi
http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/i/planning/upgrade/suptschedule.html
Rob Berendt
midrange.com
