IBM POWER Confirmed Impacted by Security Design Flaws

[Cliff Robinson]

IBM POWER architectures have been confirmed to have the same security design flaws that hit Intel, AMD, and ARM in 2018 with patches for speculative execution

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[Evan]

I do wonder the impact of this and will patch a few systems to see but if there is a big impact then no rush to patch all as power stuff is single use and private (single use meaning all lpar’s run the same applications and all managed by same group of people, also no general access to the systems other than the system admins)

It the results are anything like the the AWS info I just saw it would be terrible... but then again with our relationship and contracts with IBM it would probably involve some free power9 upgrades in the form of compensation. (Something that would have i feel would have zero hope to get from intel since not a direct intel customer but IBM directly has something to loose if the result is not good and the products we run mean that alternative hardware vendor can be implemented relatively simply)

 

[Evan]

Sorry just to add IBM gave us a heads up of this coming as I know they did other large customers, but certinaly couldn’t tell anybody anything as it was covered by our company and personal NDA’s

 

[Evan]

I have a few specific workloads I could test if people are interested.

Oracle standby and backup servers (good use of disk I/O to read and write, network for incoming logs and backup, cpu used for compressing data before sending over network)
Could also do basic SAP SGEN runs to compare before and after for SAP/oracle systems.

All are AIX 7.1 or 7.2, VIO for shared Ethernet and NPIV SAN, shared LPAR’s, power 7+ hardware first to see how it goes before looking at power 8.

Probably would only able to test next week if they have early release of OS patches else worst care when officially released.

 

[K D]

Wonder what the impact on 32bit portal/was/was and oracle rac running on P7/P8s would be. Used to be at a place where the tech stack was P8s and a few P7s.

 

[William]

The heat sinks used for those CPU's are massive !

 

[Evan]

The heat sinks used for those CPU's are massive !

IBM take cooling seriously but then again their chips are high TDP and they are often running 100% for Long periods.
Generally speaking IBM power systems the performance far exceeds what the specs would indicate, especially in regards to disk IO and network. Performance under load is extremely good.
They do however cost a bit more than your average intel system. Then again you price 2/4TB on the Low end or 16TB for a larger system ram on a system and you may be surprised how close it looks, of course you can put as much ram in intel systems so if you need it then anyway your forced into power or sparc.