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IBM Promoting POWER Systems
A reader writes:"IBM has launched a Open Power Project to
increase awareness around its Open Power product line for Linux.. The
site includes technical information, forums and provides the ability to
tinker w/ Open Power platforms at the University of Augsburg and Peking
University. Both Universities are hosting POWER5-based servers and are
providing free SSH account access to the Open Source development
community. There are rumors of additional Universities to come. They are
also hosting special showings of the War of the Worlds in San Francisco
and NYC. Looks like there are a couple of hundred pairs of free tickets
to each showing on a first come first served basis to those that register."
If you've ever worked on an IBM server, then you know why they are popular. The things are built rock solid, redundant everything, monitoring out the whazoo. In short, if it wasn't for the ever increasing processor speeds, then it would be a server that you plan to use for ten years.
We have an IBM netfinity server, dual p3, and all we've ever had to do to it was replace one drive in our 1/2 TB array. It's an absolute beauty to use, and worth every penny we paid for it.
Sorry to nitpick, but presumably you meant "people who are in a position to drive pseries server purchases - iseries are the intel based boxes...
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
Not quite that obvious. OpenPower refers to a line of servers specifically designed to run Linux (hence the "Open") part. This is a small, very small, part of the IBM lineup (which includes some serious heavy metal).
A more accurate comparison would be:
"AMD promoting Athlon64 Systems"
Even that is not much of a comparison as the Athlon64 range is a much greater percentage of AMD's product than OpenPower servers are of IBM's.
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
An OpenPower 710 will cost you about $3500 (you might even be able to find it cheaper) as opposed to $3000 for a comparable X Server. It's not that big a difference! I'd pay an extra $500 for the openness and reliability of IBM kit. (No - I don't work for IBM! I'm just a satisfied customer.)
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
The 720 is tweaked so it will not run AS/400 or AIX, but only linux. We chose SUSE because RedHat wanted to charge per LPAR. We found that no matter what we tried, after running an online update, we had an unbootable system. We had the IBM techs in for a week and after loading the system several times and updating it they continued to get the same results.
We cancelled our order and shipped back the eval units. We have no problems with Dell (after adding intel nics because the broadcom like to die).