Lenovo To Buy IBM's Server Business For $2.3 Billion

Thinkpad line by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 01:52 · Score: 1

They must have loved their Thinkpad line of laptops so much that they just HAD to have more!

CAPCHA: Reinvent

Re:Thinkpad line by dintech · 2014-01-23 02:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.
Re:Thinkpad line by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 02:40 · Score: 1

A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.
So it will be a choice between MSS and NSA?
Re:Thinkpad line by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 02:50 · Score: 1

A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing,

Weird that you got tagged insightful, when your comment shows such a lack of understanding of the Thinkpad line of laptops. The Thinkpad line of laptops were marketed to blue chip institutions, those consumers who bought one generally did so as a result of experience using one provided by a big corp.
It took Lenovo years to majorly damage the Thinkpad reputation inside big corps.
Re: Thinkpad line by eyegone · 2014-01-23 04:09 · Score: 1

It may have taken them years, but persistance apparently pays off. I don't know of anyone who thinks current generation ThinkPads are anything but junk.

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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Re:Thinkpad line by CanadianMacFan · 2014-01-23 07:52 · Score: 1

From my experience with IBM and HP blades you couldn't pay me enough to touch the HP blades. The only positive experience I had with the HP blades were that they were a nice place to warm up behind in the data centre when I was cold.
Re:Thinkpad line by cthulhu11 · 2014-01-24 06:12 · Score: 1

I eval'd an IBM server a couple of years ago. I really wanted to like it, but the serial console didn't work out of the box, and their SE's couldn't give me a simple procedure to make it work. This confounds the hell out of deployment at any scale, and when you aren't on-site with the box. Having to plug in a legacy monitor and keyboard is a dealbreaker. HP wins in that respect, you still need the factory Administrator password to log into iLO the first time, but at least that's printed on an exterior label. Unfortunately for all the features of the Gen 8 systems -- especially 3-way mirrors on the HBA's -- they seem to have reliability issues.
Re: Thinkpad line by jp10558 · 2014-01-30 08:03 · Score: 1

I don't think their junk. In comparing to the current crop of Dells (I don't look at HP for various internal reasons - I fight to get Lenovo, Dells are preferred and I really haven't thought HP was worth a fight in a long time) the Thinkpads seem to be consistently better for what we want. We pay a bit more - but there always was a price premium for IBM. We still get better customer service (YMMV), better build quality, and optionally better specs available though I'm sure some of that is related to the asinine bundles Dell offers us internally).
For us, if Lenovo keeps up in System X as well as they have in the Think branded products, we'll keep buying them. I am concerned the "cool new stuff" that IBM tended to do may not happen under Lenovo though. But in x86 servers and blades, it may not really be necessary either - I guess they may have reached the end of the line in technology.

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It Makes Sense For Lenovo by rmdingler · 2014-01-23 01:59 · Score: 1

Their dominance in the shrinking PC market has to be a cause for concern regarding future revenue streams.

Diversify, innovate, or die.

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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Ernest Hemingway

Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by alexander_686 · 2014-01-23 02:16 · Score: 1

Really? Where are you getting your information from?
IIRC, last year Lenovo was gaining market share. (This was back when Dell was trying to take Dell inc. private, one of the reasons was that Dell was losing market share to Lenovo and HP.)
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by jythie · 2014-01-23 02:20 · Score: 2

But... but.. the PC is doomed! 3 months from now there will be nothing but tablets and cell phones!
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by gstoddart · 2014-01-23 02:36 · Score: 2

IIRC, last year Lenovo was gaining market share.
But doesn't that translate to "gaining market share in an overall shrinking market"?
If we're to believe recent stats, and increasingly tablets are outstripping sales of PCs, then in the short term Lenovo could continue to increase their share. But, if the market is correspondingly getting smaller.
This gets them into the server business, which presumably is a lot more resistant to stuff like tablets -- because, nobody is going to run their enterprise software on a tablet. :-P

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Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by CastrTroy · 2014-01-23 03:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

It's not quite that bad, but unless something significant changes, I'm at the point where I buy a new PC or Laptop only when the previous one dies. And I'll only buy a new PC if the old one is unrepairable, or repairs cost more than a new one. The current computer I have is 8 years old, and still works fine for my uses. I have a newer laptop (3 years), but it was a $400 laptop, bottom of the line. Still does everything I need it to. The PC market is definitely different than 10-15 years ago when you need to buy a new machine every 2-3 years just to run the latest OS and Office software. There is nothing interesting about going out and buying a new computer, and there's very little reason to spend more than the minimum amount.

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Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 03:28 · Score: 1

But... but.. the PC is doomed! 3 months from now there will be nothing but tablets and cell phones!
The PC is not "doomed", but it's about as profitable and exciting as selling canned tomatoes. Yeah, people need them, always will, but they generally buy the cheapest ones on the shelf. The only growth comes from buying out your competitors or cutting costs.
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by alexander_686 · 2014-01-23 04:18 · Score: 1

Fair point – I slightly misread the OP.
That being said, when I read the tea leaves I see the PC market as stagnant, not shrinking. (Most people who want a PC have a PC, but there is some room for growth. So you are mostly looking at replacement sales, and I can’t think of anybody who has replaced their PC with a tablet.). You can make a decent steady profit in a mature market dominated by commodity products, but it takes different business plan than a growing, dynamic market.
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by hendrips · 2014-01-23 04:32 · Score: 1

If you trust Gartner's numbers, Lenovo's absolute sales increased by about 6% year-over-year. This increased their market share from 16% to 18% because the rest of the PC industry is shrinking. So Lenovo is continuing to grow the PC business. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, of course, since Gartner is not always completely reliable.
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by karnal · 2014-01-23 04:49 · Score: 1

I am with you on this - and nowadays, small upgrades can make an unusable machine very usable! Best bang for the buck as follows in my opinion:
1. SSD - I bought two in the last six months; one for an older core2duo laptop and one for a core2quad desktop. Both machines run circles around the other hard drive based machines in my house.
2. Memory - even though DDR2 prices are seemingly through the roof compared to DDR3, still less expensive than a new machine. Max out that memory if you find it hard to open multiple apps. The laptop is limited to 4GB, I find myself hitting that limit (no swap on SSD).
3. Graphics - can't do anything about the laptop, but even low end cards can beat the high end cards of years ago.
These three things will make me not need a new desktop at home for a while, and even though the laptop I own can't get a graphics update - for what I do with it, it's probably going to outlast the desktop excluding any hardware failure.

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Karnal
Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by MachineShedFred · 2014-01-23 05:55 · Score: 1

They did increase their share of a shrinking market. Yes.
Which is exactly what the GP post said.

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Re:It Makes Sense For Lenovo by flyingfsck · 2014-01-23 07:45 · Score: 1

That is why IBM is selling. Tablets and cell phones running on ARM processors is where it is at. Intel even closed a brand new factory just before they were supposed to open it.

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Over 30 years by Koen+Lefever · 2014-01-23 01:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

I remember thinking "too little, too late" when IBM launched its x86 line (the IBM 5150 PC with 8088 CPU) in 1981.

Damn, over 30 years later and we're still stuck with a variant of that architecture!

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Re:Over 30 years by ackthpt · 2014-01-23 02:38 · Score: 2

I remember thinking "too little, too late" when IBM launched its x86 line (the IBM 5150 PC with 8088 CPU) in 1981.
Damn, over 30 years later and we're still stuck with a variant of that architecture!
Too little, too late? You missed the target methinks. They dictated the architecture which is on desks these days, and made Microsoft unbelievably rich with that little oversight, letting Gates sell his version of DOS, too.
Where they utterly blew it, though, was in pursuing the regrettable PS/2 line up. Horrible machines which locked you into horrible upgrade paths. It was shortly afterwards they began shedding people so fast I didn't know which salesman I was talking to from week to week when we were acquiring an RS6000 for some stupid purpose.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:Over 30 years by jalopezp · 2014-01-23 02:42 · Score: 1

Duh, it was always meant to be backwards compatible.
Re:Over 30 years by plopez · 2014-01-23 02:54 · Score: 1

WHich means they tigtly bound the OS to the hardware. Massive fail.

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putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Re:Over 30 years by Koen+Lefever · 2014-01-23 03:37 · Score: 1

Too little, too late? You missed the target methinks.
Yeah, that much is obvious. I really expected the PC to tank - after all we already had superior architectures, like MC68000 (obviously) and Z8000 (that would have been flamebait back then) and NS32000 was just around the corner.

It was the first time I witnessed how hype and a brand name could trump quality, especially because IBM had deliberately chosen a crippled processor (8088 was a 8086 with an 8-bit bus) - that was a harsh lesson.

They dictated the architecture which is on desks these days
Indeed, that's what I'm whining about. I guess I'll have to get over it some day.

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/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
Re:Over 30 years by nojayuk · 2014-01-23 05:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

The 8086 family including the 8088 8-bit bus version were available to buy in commercial quantities at a time when the MC68000 was still a hangar queen with dev boards running at half the speed of the planned production machines (we tried overclocking our dev board from 4MHz to the production speed of 8MHz, didn't work). The Z8000 was even more of a pipe dream.
In addition the 8086/8088 worked with all the 8080-family bus chips like the serial port, parallel port, interrupt controller, 8087 maths chip etc. The MC68k had to fake all that functionality with separate and expensive silicon (no affordable FPGA chips back then). Software -- the 8086 was deliberately designed with an 8080-family structure of registers and memory access internally which made it easy to port existing CP/M code over to the new platform and Intel wrote compilers and provided other tools to make that job easy. The MC68k was a dream to write new code for but it took a lot more effort to get something, anything working on it.
Re:Over 30 years by Waffle+Iron · 2014-01-23 05:36 · Score: 1

It was the first time I witnessed how hype and a brand name could trump quality, especially because IBM had deliberately chosen a crippled processor (8088 was a 8086 with an 8-bit bus) - that was a harsh lesson.
I think that you're discounting the mechanical quality in the PC's success. IBM PCs were solid machines that had a resemblance to their mainframe terminals. Unlike many competitors of the time, PCs were neither overly clunky nor toy-like. Many business managers, who were not necessarily all that familiar with microcomputers, probably put a lot of weight into the mechanicals when they made purchasing decisions.
Sometimes I wish I still had one of those heavy clicky keyboards and that pleasing green long-persistence phosphor.
Re:Over 30 years by cavebison · 2014-01-24 06:53 · Score: 1

> I remember thinking "too little, too late" when IBM launched its x86 line (the IBM 5150 PC with 8088 CPU) in 1981.
Memories! I cut my programming teeth on an IBM 5120, entering Star Traders (like Starlanes only text-ier) and Star Trek from hobbyist coding books. The days!

$2.3 Billion by globaljustin · 2014-01-23 02:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

So basically Lenovo got a server manufacturer for almost $1Billion less than Snapchat is worth.

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Thank you Dave Raggett

Re:$2.3 Billion by Plumpaquatsch · 2014-01-23 02:27 · Score: 1

So basically Lenovo got a server manufacturer for almost $1Billion less than Snapchat is worth.
Yeah, or Nest.

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Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Re:$2.3 Billion by CastrTroy · 2014-01-23 02:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

When you put it that way, you start to realize how big the bubble is getting in social and other web platforms. A business that's actually taking in revenue (quit a bit, I would guess) is worth significantly less than a web service that has no way of generating revenue, and who's users can switch to a new, almost identical web service tomorrow, if they start charging money or showing ads to generate revenue. Companies like to keep their servers the same, because things (like remote hardware management ex.HP ILO) don't interoperate between different vendors. So they're going to be able to retain quite a few customers as long as they don't change anything, and just keep on producing boxes that work.

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Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:$2.3 Billion by bayankaran · 2014-01-23 03:06 · Score: 1

So basically Lenovo got a server manufacturer for almost $1Billion less than Snapchat is worth.
Me thinks it was a backhanded plan by Snapchat founders/promoters to get someone interested in the company. Then it did not work as they wanted...they probably expected a bidding war.

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Tat Tvam Asi
Re:$2.3 Billion by globaljustin · 2014-01-23 03:10 · Score: 1

Right I hear you. Huge bubbles of valuation still happening.
I honestly don't know *what* to think about bubble companies like Snapchat.
On one hand, it's bad for our industry to have such huge misperceptions of value...which filters down to the web designer job at a little design shop or a coder for a startup and even to how the government hires tech contractors.
On the flipside, it is amazing ammount of money for Snapchat, something which I'm sure alot of /.'ers could create with enough effort & maybe a non-tech partner. I love that the snapchats of the world are over-valued in that sense.
I *am* a business owner so I kind of have to decide...for me building businesses I'm hoping to sell I had to 'stick to the knitting' & not play the hype game, but I admit it is tempting.

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Thank you Dave Raggett
Re:$2.3 Billion by ebno-10db · 2014-01-23 08:48 · Score: 2

This is also how the US is screwing itself in the long (or maybe not so long) run. By throwing money at the latest fad or bubble, that's likely here today and gone tomorrow, or which can at least be easily duplicated, we're depriving real industry of investment. Sell them off to China - we'll invest in Snapchat!
Meanwhile China is investing in industry that produces real products, and the US is outsourcing such production (or even just selling it to China). By "real products" I mean services as well as goods, but useful services instead of games that go from boom to bust in no time. We're seeing an echo of the dot bomb era. FB has a P/E of 144, and they're one of the more substantive companies. Meanwhile GE is teaching China how to build jet engines. That's an industry that's so difficult to enter that there are only three players worth talking about (GE, Pratt-Whitney and Rolls-Royce), two of them are American, and all of them have been in the business since the first jet engines were produced at the end of WWII. That's not a business you can enter by buying a few servers and putting something that's (temporarily) cool on them.

first! by mariusp · 2014-01-23 02:04 · Score: 1

and not a damn funny things comes to mind. This should however be interesting going forward as IBM always had a knack for getting out of a market just before it went to hell

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I am what I am

Chinese Rule!!! by HansKloss · 2014-01-23 02:06 · Score: 1, Insightful

Anything left from from good 'ol USA?
Yes I forgot. Numerous 3 letter agencies, cameras, police, security forces in kindergartens, schools and grocery stores, private prisons with largest population in it.

Re:Chinese Rule!!! by supremebob · 2014-01-23 02:08 · Score: 5, Funny

I guess that IBM's customers can now stop worrying about the NSA planting bugs in their servers and worry about the Chinese government doing it instead :)
Re:Chinese Rule!!! by alexander_686 · 2014-01-23 02:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

IIRC Lenovo is headquartered in the US and just opened another plant for PCs in the south. I don’t want to dismiss all of the concerns but let us try to put this in perspective.
Re:Chinese Rule!!! by TheloniousToady · 2014-01-23 02:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

Look at it this way: the Chinese may feel rich enough to pay $2.3 billion for server business, but only Americans feel rich enough to pay $3.2 billion for a thermostat business. So, who has the bigger Nest egg?
Re:Chinese Rule!!! by hendrips · 2014-01-23 03:39 · Score: 5, Informative

Lenovo has "dual headquarters" in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina, but it is definitely a Chinese company - stock is traded in Hong Kong, the directors are Chinese, etc. That said, Lenovo isn't really a state-backed enterprise to the same degree as companies like Huawei; they probably don't receive much more government interference than, say, Apple or HP. Admittedly, that's not much comfort...
Re:Chinese Rule!!! by alexander_686 · 2014-01-23 04:03 · Score: 1

We might be splitting hairs but Lenovo’s official headquarters is in North Carolina. That is, when Lenovo has to list it’s physical address, it lists NC. Which in and of itself is limited information. There are some companies where the headquarters is just a small rump part of the larger company.
There is also the country of domical, used for taxes, IIRC is China. And then there is the country of risk, which is where the 3 major centers come in.
The reason why I am pointing out that the headquarters are in NC is that it implies that there are Americans in high positions. Maybe not the top and maybe not the dominate positions, but still positions of power. It implies that NC is something more than a low end, low value assembly shop or that Lenovo is transferring out knowledge wholesale, hollowing it out, and then shutting it down.
As somebody who supports free trade we are going to see more cases like this. Lenovo raises some concerns, but these are the typical concerns of increased foreign trade. There are other companies, such as Hewitt, which gives me pause. Hewitt is a very closed and murky company.

I for one.... by slapout · 2014-01-23 02:07 · Score: 1, Funny

...don't welcome our new Chinese overloads. (Do you realize how hard it's going to be to learn to write/type Manderin?)

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Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad

Re:I for one.... by jythie · 2014-01-23 02:42 · Score: 1

Well, if they are making saner investment decisions then American companies right now, a little overlording might not be such a bad thing.
Re:I for one.... by marsu_k · 2014-01-23 03:05 · Score: 5, Funny

...don't welcome our new Chinese overloads. (Do you realize how hard it's going to be to learn to write/type Manderin?)
You already seem to be struggling with English.
Re:I for one.... by wcrowe · 2014-01-23 04:04 · Score: 1

Do you realize how hard it's going to be to learn to write/type Manderin?
Especially if you can't even write/type Mandarin in English.

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Proverbs 21:19
Re:I for one.... by jafac · 2014-01-23 07:08 · Score: 1

something like 60% of Chinese don't even know how to write/type Mandarin. They seem to get along okay.

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These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Re:I for one.... by jones_supa · 2014-01-23 07:13 · Score: 1

...don't welcome our new Chinese overloads. (Do you realize how hard it's going to be to learn to write/type Manderin?)
Must be hard if you even write the language's name wrong. :P
Re:I for one.... by ebno-10db · 2014-01-23 09:07 · Score: 1

Do you realize how hard it's going to be to learn to write/type Manderin?
You learn to speak Mandarin, but to read and write Chinese. On the bright side, maybe they'll take pity on us and let us use pinyin.

ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by nimbius · 2014-01-23 02:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

eh, greybeard here so maybe its the metamucil talking but IBM never stood much chance in the server realm. not that they didnt make a damn fine x86...most were quiet and powerful, but the market hat was looking toward IBM was too different and weird.

if you wanted a workstation for simple 2D cad stuff your clear alternative was dell. it was cheap, came with whatever copy of windows you wanted, and didnt bankrupt your small shop with overhead from licensing and support contracts....other than whatever autodesk was gouging you for.

a litle higher up the chain, if you were doing some composite rendering or computational fluid thermodynamics you had Sun microsystems. they made the bulletproof UNIX the grads from the local alma-mater recognized, and the hardware was dependable. sun servers chugged through the heavy arithmetic but the deskside SPARCstation was the sterling ally of the well-weathered fogie in the corner office who occasionally appeared for his 'laureate engineer' paperweight. the IT department appreciated suns no-nonsense RTFM mentality.

BIS, corporate informatics and number-crunchery that fed paychecks through the line printers and requisitions across the department heads was the golden child of IBM...heck, its in the name! BUSINESS machines! the AS400 ran cobol and from its cobwebbed confines were excreted every known model and function of how the money made the business and vice versa. "terminals" kept the cost of doing dirty work down and a few cloistered chosen were sequestered into office space to stitch new lovecraftian code whenever an earnings summary needed a tweak or a new way of visualizing things 'outside the box' needed rendering in code. AS400 turned into Z's and E's and I's and soon JDEdwards became Oracle and the new reality of deadlocked transactions and segfaulted Business Objects servers were a daily bain for the IT department but the song never changed. this was to become IBM. Because the reports were a touchstone of the business these machines lived to become behemoths and their triumphs accoladed from on high by watsons and oh so many marketeers that knew no boundaries in the iron they could sell. IBM was the Iron Business Marauder, the Intractable Bloat of the Management, the only way your applications would ever imply support for your way of doing business in the ERP EAP SAP clusterfuck that BIS and management had conceeded was somehow a necessity now. IBM could never hope to sell X86, because IBM sold complicity and approval in the licensing agreements for Oracle and enterprise, not hardware.

and while they toiled over the iron they sold, Dell and HP slowly absorbed the engineering fallout from SGI implosions and cheap commodity x86 incursion around a SUN that comparatively stood as a more expensive and only slightly quicker means of doing what the engineers had always done. Goosed a bit by linux, no doubt.

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Good people go to bed earlier.

Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 02:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

tl;dr: commodity hardware and software, over time, takes over everything, and IBM lacks a unique selling point
frankly I'm astonished that they outlived Sun, although both were obviously doomed
taking bets on how long before Lenovo buys the IBM trademark? Or will they not even bother?
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 03:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

As soon as IBM's real money makers go away, being System z and p. So, never.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by iggymanz · 2014-01-23 05:16 · Score: 1

real IT greybeard here, those x86 commodity crap wintel boxes aren't real servers. Let me give you a hint, the world's money and your insurance and stocks are on real big iron, and IBM dominates that market.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 06:01 · Score: 1

Really? Really? Tell Google, Amazon etc. that 'x86 aren't real servers'! or the hundreds/thousands/millions of companies running their business on this 'not server hardware'....I'm not an x86 'fanboy', been around long enough to know we could be somewhere significantly better if history had taken a different turn long ago, but in today's world of virtualization taking over everything to the point that you can throw (almost) any stinking crap hardware at a problem provided you have enough to mitigate all failures what is the distinction people use in identifying 'real servers' from 'fake servers' anyway? What does it matter if you have an AS at $100K that doesn't hiccup once in 5 years versus 5 'commodity x86' servers working together at 1/10th the price where 1 fails every year but can be easily replaced? Obviously I'm making up the numbers here, but except for maybe some specialized uses virtualization has made hardware entirely a commodity, to be discarded like so much fluff out of your vaccuum cleaner...replace at will & as needed...this is why the 'server business' is dying & why IBM is selling that off...they will concentrate on the high margin 'special areas' & software & the vast majority of the world will not care 1 iota.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by afidel · 2014-01-23 06:19 · Score: 1

You mean global services and software, right? Because THAT is where the money is.

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Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by bored · 2014-01-23 06:27 · Score: 1

You mean z and i.... p has been struggling due to the onslaught of x86's with Linux.
Sure p/i are the same hardware now and can run linux too. But in the end its far easier to switch from linux/power or aix/power to linux/x86 than it is to switch from IBM i/zos to some other platform.
So, both of those markets are nice, but IBM will continue to try an milk them like HP does with nonstop/openvms/etc. Its only a matter of time before the margins on those start to get squeezed as people decide paying ten million dollars for something they can port to linux and run on $50k a year of hardware is stupid. Or more likely, a 3rd party starts providing similar services as the in house applications and the bean counters decide to outsource the whole shebang (seen that a couple times recently).
Frankly, both IBM i and AIX could be ported to x86 and the whole power hardware division go away in 5 or 6 years while still maintaining the existing software lock.
zOS, probably not so much unless they use one of the emulation technologies they have locked away in the vault.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by ebno-10db · 2014-01-23 09:13 · Score: 1

You mean global services and software, right? Because THAT is where the money is.
You mean until more customers realize that IBM (a/k/a India Business Machines) services and software is overpriced garbage, and that it's better to have it done in the US (often in-house) if quality is your concern, or to deal directly with India if lowest cost is what you want.
IBM used to be known as the company that nobody ever got fired for buying from. They were expensive, but their stuff worked damn well and their service was phenomenal. Nowadays they're just another ripoff whorehouse living on memories of a once great name. Customers will eventually catch on to that.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by dwywit · 2014-01-23 11:51 · Score: 1

System i is already hosted on x86 - see "Pure Systems". It's a great OS, with granularity of control I've never seen in *nix or Windows.
Back in the day, I used to think that it would be wonderful when PCs became powerful enough to run OS400. I'd still like to see it, even if emulated.

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They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by bored · 2014-01-23 13:27 · Score: 1

System i is already hosted on x86
Really? Didn't know that, I thought you had to have a POWER compute node in your pureflex system to run IBM i... Do you have a link indicating that it will run on the x86 compute nodes ?
Frankly, i'm skeptical. I've seen the presentations and I don't ever remember seeing anything about IBM i/i5/i5OS/as400 nodes being hosted on x86, only on POWER. Sure you can put them in the same cabinet, but that is really nothing new, just now you can manage them from the same console. With a crapload of limitations of course. It takes about 3 seconds to find all kinds of issues with the way IBM is managing the systems.. I blew some minds when I asked if I could manage vmware and powerVM instances from the same console (the answer was no at the time).
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by dwywit · 2014-01-23 13:39 · Score: 1

Whoops - I think you're right. I've only read the sales summaries. I thought it was a bit strange at the time - x86 is kind of anathema to the design of IBM i/OS400.

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They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by bored · 2014-01-24 04:21 · Score: 1

However, Software wise z/OS is now so far behind it gets harder and harder to find people who want to work with it.
I agree. No one expects to have to write assembly to basically roll some logs, but that is exactly what I found myself doing a couple years ago. Hacking up the example hooks to install a piece of functionality that should be part of any sane OS.
Or for that matter spending 2 days installing/configuring z/VM and editing the configuration with text editors that would have been put to shame by the editors found on home computers of the early 80s. All this for a configuration similar to what could be archived on a PC in less than 15 minutes with few mouse clicks and vmware.
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by iggymanz · 2014-01-24 10:47 · Score: 1

of course google and amazon work in the realm of "beyond embarassingly parallel" type problems. I guarentee you they are not tracking their money, payroll, etc. with such systems. Note that amazon and google sometimes can't manage the failures either, and they "go down".
Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance. by jp10558 · 2014-01-31 01:16 · Score: 1

The problem I find is that it's not easy to actually make the 5 servers work together such that the services survive a server failure in the same way that a single server can survive a loss of a redundant PSU or 1 disk from a RAID6. I'm sure it will eventually get there, but if you're midsized and want to run in house (and I think you should) you are better served by reliability and set it and forget it hardware vs planning to replace a new deployment server every year.
Our x86 (non crap, IBM system X servers) have replacement expectations of 4 years, so your method would be 4x as much work at the lowest level. Of course, VMWare is free right? With HA failover?
I'm not arguing that you need a $100k server, but White box commodity only works well if you can buy (i.e. the cost goes to software rather than hardware) really good HA tools or you have the people and experience and time to configure a hash of OSS tools that may or may not actually give you HA. (We use RHEL HA for KVM, but the guest OS still crashes when a cluster member dies, it's just restarted immediately on another cluster member.)
I've looked into OpenStack and Open Nebula, both of which are so complex that we'd need years of time to even consider rolling them out - oh and a bunch of hardware, to do internal cloud like stuff, that I'm not sure is worth the complexity and difficulty.
VMWare licensing (last time I looked) costs makes $10k servers look cheap.
It seems to me IBM just doesn't want to target where their servers make sense (SMB) and Lenovo does - so this hopefully will work as well (maybe better) than the Think* products.
I feel that one of the reasons we've had so many outages recently is because everyone bought into the "hardware is a commodity" mentality. I don't think current software actually makes up for flaky hardware... I just hope that at some point more people realize the man hours, down time, software license expense and complexity of setup and maintenance might just as well be significantly reduced by just using decent hardware.

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Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3

so... by buddyglass · 2014-01-23 02:14 · Score: 1

Is IBM just "Global Services" now?

Re:so... by ackthpt · 2014-01-23 02:34 · Score: 1

Is IBM just "Global Services" now?
Yep. If you have one of those big, spinny carbord globes, they'll come by and polish it up a treat for you.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:so... by shadowknot · 2014-01-23 03:17 · Score: 1

There's still the large pSeries and System z market.
Re:so... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2014-01-23 03:58 · Score: 2

They still make a lot of software: http://www-01.ibm.com/software...
And I guess $1 billion of that sale will be used to finance their new $1 billion Watson division.

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Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!

Straight Out of Cringlely's Crystal Ball by theodp · 2014-01-23 02:15 · Score: 1

Robert X. Cringely's Ten technology predictions for 2014: #2 - IBM throws in the towel.

Re:The world has gone nuts by jythie · 2014-01-23 02:27 · Score: 2

This really strikes me as something going very wrong in the tech industry, or perhaps where it intersects the financial industry. Any time you start seeing such offers it is generally a good sign that there is too much investment money and not enough good investments floating around... or some very dangerous group think is going on.

One of these days... by ackthpt · 2014-01-23 02:33 · Score: 1

One day I'll be driving past a strip mall and see the familiar blue sign. It will now be the trademark of a shoe store.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Great by FuzzNugget · 2014-01-23 02:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Now Lenovo can fuck up that product line too, just like they did with the ThinkPad.

Branding / Covering Your Job by Etherwalk · 2014-01-23 02:39 · Score: 2

A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.

This was definitely my first thought--a lot of value is in the IBM mark. If Lenovo can't brand the hardware and services and IBM, they're going to lose a lot of business relative to the value of the sold hardware and related services business prior to purchase. I would think a bunch of people would continue to use them for legacy equipment or when they want new hardware to function especially smoothly with legacy equipment, but for a lot of institutional clients, I think you just wouldn't consider Lenovo.

I would think that when you're purchasing a solution to a tech issue for a major institution, you're looking for three things: (1) that the solution will work, (2) that the solution is something you can justify spending money on to your bosses, and (3) that the solution is something that will cover your ass at least somewhat if it fails (i.e. you can point to a major brand name the CEO will know and they are more likely to believe that it should have worked, but if you point to a brand without a reputation or that they feel at all sketchy about they will blame you for picking it).

Of course, YMMV

Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by SpzToid · 2014-01-23 04:04 · Score: 2

Say it ain't so. I have had my eyes on a top o' line Lenovo W540 notebook because it specs very well, is Ubuntu Certified, and HP's alternative was rated as 'noisy' in the few reviews available for me to read so far.
That notebook stuck out for those reasons, while I found no other alternatives; mainly because linux support is such a crap-shoot.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/leno...

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You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by chmod+a+x+mojo · 2014-01-23 04:12 · Score: 1

Yeah, I bought a "thinkpad" type laptop about 6 months ago. Decent-ish specs, but absolute shit keyboard. I had to put a large spacer between the mainboard and the keyboard tray base just to get the spacebar to work consistently. I hate that almost everybody is going with the shitty chicklet keyboards nowadays, it feels like you need to either be an elephant or hit the damn keys with a big hammer when typing.
Other than the shitty keyboard ( one thing I DO like is the full numpad for number entry), I can't complain about the hardware for the price I paid, it was cheap enough to toss 16gigs of ram in to make the i5 hum along for most things.

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To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by default+luser · 2014-01-23 04:33 · Score: 1

I believe you two are talking about different sorts of noise.
I believe GP was referring to SIGNAL noise on the USB line playing havoc with his RS-232 adapter. It does not mean that the laptop FAN is loud. It's also not certain that you would have issues with normal USB devices, give what a corner case RS-232 adapters are.

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Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by SpzToid · 2014-01-23 04:52 · Score: 1

Sorry, but I should made my concern for fan noise more clear in my text. The HP & Dell reviews I've read for workstation-type notebooks said they suffered from fan noise which seems like a poor design implementation.
The last notebook I bought was an HP Prosumer piece of junk, and the fan noise was terrible and impossible for me to overlook. I sold the notebook at a loss because it wasn't useful to me at all and would only become less valuable as time passed. If I pay $2000 for a W540 I want it quiet and Ubuntu Certified, along with all the published specs to be true.
My concern in my original comment simply had to do with quality. I just want to buy a quality notebook to spec which is silent to my ears, and easy on the eyes.

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You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by Third+Position · 2014-01-23 05:13 · Score: 2

This was definitely my first thought--a lot of value is in the IBM mark. If Lenovo can't brand the hardware and services and IBM, they're going to lose a lot of business relative to the value of the sold hardware and related services business prior to purchase. I would think a bunch of people would continue to use them for legacy equipment or when they want new hardware to function especially smoothly with legacy equipment, but for a lot of institutional clients, I think you just wouldn't consider Lenovo.
That may be true for American companies, but consider Chinese companies, who have no small concern about the US's spying activities. It's a lot more likely a Chinese company is going to be able to sell into the Chinese market than a US one would. Remember that after the Snowden revelations China cancelled a hefty number of orders for IBM equipment, sufficient to do some pretty substantial damage to IBM's revenues and stock price. I suspect Lenovo is going to be a lot more successful in China than IBM has any hope of being.
Presumably IBM will retain an interest in Lenovo's server business as part of the deal, the same as they did with their PC business, but will have no involvement in running the business.

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American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by aztracker1 · 2014-01-23 07:02 · Score: 1

I was pretty happy with my 2010 Macbook Pro (though the keyboard layout takes getting used to), until it was stolen earlier this month... I'm using a Chromebook for personal use in the interim until I check out the current options, when I got the MBP in May 2010, it was pretty much the best option... I'm not heavily tied to any particular OS, and don't mind doing the work stuff in windows on a VM... YMMV, not a fanboi just happy with that hardware (and I can't stand iOS)

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Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by SpzToid · 2014-01-23 07:19 · Score: 1

Some people even run OSX in VMware. Me? I like VMs as useful containers of stuff, and as a dev, I appreciate how well snapshots work. Ubuntu 64bit LTS/ Gnome 3 is my preferred host OS and works really well for that purpose. YMMV, just a thought.

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You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Re:Branding / Covering Your Job by cayenne8 · 2014-01-24 02:53 · Score: 1

I believe GP was referring to SIGNAL noise on the USB line playing havoc with his RS-232 adapter. It does not mean that the laptop FAN is loud. It's also not certain that you would have issues with normal USB devices, give what a corner case RS-232 adapters are.
Indeed....it was not fan noise, nothing audible, I couldn't care less about that, but it played hell with the app I was trying to develop and integrate with an external device.

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Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

Weapons grade stupidity by sjbe · 2014-01-23 03:03 · Score: 1

So basically Lenovo got a server manufacturer for almost $1Billion less than Snapchat is worth.

Which merely tells you that Facebook's acquisition team is very likely incompetent since Snapchat has zero revenue and unclear prospects for profitability. $3 billion is an absolutely absurd price and spending money like that is a big reason why I have no intention of buying Facebook stock. It also tells you that the owners of Snapchat are a bunch of weapons grade morons for turning down an offer like that. The only thing dumber than Facebook offering that much money for Snapchat was when Snapchat declined the offer.

Re:Weapons grade stupidity by tomhath · 2014-01-23 03:07 · Score: 1

The only thing dumber than Facebook offering that much money for Snapchat was when Snapchat declined the offer.
I don't know about that...Microsoft's offer of somewhere around $50B for Yahoo comes to mind.
Re:Weapons grade stupidity by jddeluxe · 2014-01-23 03:22 · Score: 2

I don't know about that...Microsoft's offer of somewhere around $50B for Yahoo comes to mind.
Actually, the only thing dumber than that was Jerry Yang NOT taking the $50 billion...
Re:Weapons grade stupidity by sjbe · 2014-01-23 03:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

I don't know about that...Microsoft's offer of somewhere around $50B for Yahoo comes to mind.
I agree it was a really really really dumb offer and even dumber to turn down but at least Yahoo has profits of about $1 billion/year. The valuation was stupidly high but at least you could base it on something. $3 billion for a company with zero revenues is beyond ridiculous and turning it down has to be one of the dumbest business decisions in the last 20 years.
Re:Weapons grade stupidity by ebno-10db · 2014-01-23 08:50 · Score: 1

the owners of Snapchat are a bunch of weapons grade morons for turning down an offer like that
You won't be saying that when Google offers $5B.
Re:Weapons grade stupidity by sjbe · 2014-01-24 03:09 · Score: 1

You won't be saying that when Google offers $5B.
Yes I will unless there is some actual revenue and a path to profitability.

Everyone Gets Fired Now by tekrat · 2014-01-23 03:05 · Score: 4, Funny

"No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"

Except now, you can't buy any IBM hardware, right? So, how are you going to avoid getting fired?

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If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.

Too harsh... by bayankaran · 2014-01-23 03:20 · Score: 2

I think you are too harsh on Lenovo.
I am using the Thinkpad X series and T series for the last 12 years...from the IBM days to the current iteration. I am yet to see a significant drop in quality on those two lines after Lenovo started rebranding. I am not sure about their entry models though.

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Tat Tvam Asi

Re:Too harsh... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-23 03:46 · Score: 2, Informative
I just went through the entire Lenovo line - every laptop/ultrabook they produce - and they offer only ONE machine that:
- * doesn't have a reflective screen
- * has a centered keyboard and trackpad
- * is a 15" screen or higher, 1920x1080
That machine is the W530, and it doesn't even have the new Haswell i7 processors. It's one generation behind and they're still asking $1300 for the base configuration.
The rest of the Lenovo models have characteristics which impair usability - basically, doesn't meet the bulleted list above. In addition, they add on screwed-up keyboards, like:
- * the X1 Carbon, which instead of a caps lock key has a home + end key and replaces the function keys with an LCD panel that changes based on the application you're in
- * other models which don't have an indicator light for caps lock - I'm getting lazy and don't feel like posting any more links
I saw another, new model that was ranked 2.5/5 stars for being unable to resume from sleep mode because Lenovo ships broken drivers that conflict with each other.
Lenovo has destroyed Thinkpad.
CAPTCHA: stable
Re:Too harsh... by bill_mcgonigle · 2014-01-23 04:36 · Score: 3, Informative

They have a model that competes in that space, sure.
However, I'm typing this on an e430. Proper keyboard, non-glare screen, f-keys (OK, the F-key paint is secondary to the 'media' paint, buy they are marked). It has a trackpoint and hard buttons for the insane people who can use those and they work on Fedora just fine. Centrino wireless, mSATA slot for the SSD (128GB Mushkin in mine), DVD-R, removable battery. I've got 8 gigs of RAM in it. The BIOS even has a setting to put the control key back where it belongs. I got the one with the lowest-wattage i5 that has AES-NI and the whole rig cost me under $900.
Two things I would like: backlit keyboard, better resolution screen. What I don't care about: looking hipster at Starbucks.

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My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:Too harsh... by jratcliffe · 2014-01-23 05:46 · Score: 1

I think you are too harsh on Lenovo.
I am using the Thinkpad X series and T series for the last 12 years...from the IBM days to the current iteration. I am yet to see a significant drop in quality on those two lines after Lenovo started rebranding. I am not sure about their entry models though.
Agreed. The X and T series (which are the descendents of the old Thinkpad lines) have held up nicely. The other series, which don't have the same "genes," I don't really care for.
Re:Too harsh... by rdnetto · 2014-01-24 01:27 · Score: 1

Take a look at the T440p (i.e. the flagship thinkpad). They've removed the mouse buttons, but apart from that it meets all the criteria on your list. At the rate things are going, it's probably going to be the last model with physical function keys.

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Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.

Distributed Systems? Bah! by shadowknot · 2014-01-23 03:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

The truth is that IBM's primary server market has never been its x86 offerings. The pSeries and System z market is much more lucrative what with engine licensing (CP, IFL etc) and massively expensive platform specific operating systems (z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, AIX etc) along with decades old products like CICS powering the vast majority of the financial world. I work closely with a contractor who worked for IBM for nearly four decades and his attitude to the distributed world is likely representative of a general antipathy to x86 on the server side within IBM (though I have no evidence other than him to back that up!) I suspect though, that the fact they can focus on "real" servers on the hardware side will probably be seen as good by most in Endicott.

Re:Distributed Systems? Bah! by Robear · 2014-01-23 07:48 · Score: 1

...And they are massively vulnerable to SPARC in those markets now. They will need to focus and up their game just to stay competitive. Wait and see what happens in the next few years in the markets Power competes in.

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French - The lingua franca of Europe!
Re:Distributed Systems? Bah! by Funk_dat69 · 2014-01-23 09:23 · Score: 1

riiight..., there is a real ground swell of people moving *to* Solaris and Oracle's loving, popular and customer friendly arms. (chuckle)
The threat in the high end is Intel creeping upwards to more profitable systems while ARM starts to devour everything at the low-low end.

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FUNK!

Flex? by HideyoshiJP · 2014-01-23 03:31 · Score: 1

I can see the sale of the System x and Bladecenters, but the sale of Flex Systems surprises me. I thought that was supposed to be their new hotness of 2012 - the magic box that lets you fire all your sysadmins. Maybe people didn't like having to develop using websphere?

Re:Flex? by gelfling · 2014-01-23 05:19 · Score: 1

That's a done deal through virtualization anyway. Cram 20 images on a few MPU blades.
Re:Flex? by DiSKiLLeR · 2014-01-23 09:06 · Score: 1

We were planning to buy a bunch of flex system chassis... (after all, bladecenter is now obsolete and replaced by flex.)
Guess we'll be looking at HP now.

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You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.

Re:I will never... by kullnd · 2014-01-23 03:48 · Score: 1

You do realize that Lenovo (the Chinese Company) builds ThinkPad Laptops in the USA? Strange huh - The US companies all build their stuff in China.

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+++ATH0 NO CARRIER

Re:I will never... by jerryjnormandin · 2014-01-23 04:08 · Score: 1

Save here. Do you remember when counterfiet Cisco devices hit the market ?

It's not even ALL the Intel server biz by gelfling · 2014-01-23 05:17 · Score: 1

Just the commodity low end part of it e.g. the servers in a single server cabinet, the small office market. Large Intel servers are still IBM.

Re:The world has gone nuts by iggymanz · 2014-01-23 05:18 · Score: 2

nothing nuts about it, profits too slim in x86 commodity server market. IBM can focus on consulting, high end enterprise softwares and big iron.

Re:I will never... by airdweller · 2014-01-23 07:52 · Score: 1

"Lenovo (the Chinese Company) builds ThinkPad Laptops in the USA"
Source?

Re:Is it too soon to send our Condolences? by ebno-10db · 2014-01-23 09:17 · Score: 1

IBM .. big Iron, knew it well.. couldn't make the leap to the Cloud Iron

Big Iron was the Cloud before anybody invented that idiotic term. The Cloud is just a return to the past, and all its problems, only with worse security and reliability.

You people must really abuse your laptops by msobkow · 2014-01-23 11:41 · Score: 1

I bought a cheap consumer grade laptop from Lenovo who's only standout quality was a core i7 processor (because I was going to use it primarily as a compute server.) I've had zero problems with it. None. Zip. Zilch.

But I set my laptop bag down gently instead of tossing it on the couch or floor.

I remember that it's a piece of fragile electronics at it's heart, not some mil-spec tank designed to take a .50 calibre bullet and keep running. It's a trade off -- I'd rather have to take care of it than slug around a heavier chassis that might be a little bit more durable.

Just a few days ago, a friend was complaining on Crackbook about how "shitty" Toshiba laptops are. Well, it turns out that her kid had the laptop in her backpack, slipped on the ice, and landed full body weight on the laptop on her back.

There is no machine that will survive such abuse, and I told her that. She doesn't care. She'll "Never buy another Toshiba."

I suspect that 90% of the people griping about Lenovo's quality are in the same boat.

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I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.

Re:Focussing on POWER by ChunderDownunder · 2014-01-24 16:16 · Score: 1

Troll, really mods??

Much server code (e.g. Linux based) is processor agnostic from LAMP to JBoss. High performance stuff Oracle/Weblogic/Solaris on Sparc or DB2/Websphere on POWER is tuned to run on vendor specific hardware. That leaves Windows and SQLServer/.net. With MS investing in ARMv8, even Windows server applications on the CLR won't be Intel dependent.

so if the future of the data center is parallelized ARM64 for performance/watt and IBM's own POWER for grunt work then x86 becomes a diminishing market.

Incorrect by Junta · 2014-01-25 01:58 · Score: 1

If it has an x86 chip, it's going. Period. This includes everything from their tower servers, to 1u/2u dual socket servers, to NextScale, to Flex, all the way up to their Xeon EX based servers. For BladeCenter and Flex (where the enclosures can hold both POWER and x86 systems), Lenovo also gets the enclosure, partner relationships, and IBM OEMs the enclosure back for use in selling POWER blades. HMC hardware appliances will be sourced from lenovo.

If you really have your heart set on *IBM*, then you have to get i, p, or z systems now.

Of course, all the people that are actually behind the qualities sought after in IBM hardware go with the sale. History suggests that those people will largely be left intact since that's what happened to the PC business.

Service is a question, since those people were tasked with servicing all the server hardware. That hasn't been perfectly clarified. It sounded most like the intent is that IBM keeps the technicians, but they will be required to service Lenovo as well as IBM equipment (presumably Lenovo ongoing pays something for the privilege). Perhaps someone familiar with Lenovo desktop experience can speak to how that panned out (all of the laptop vendors I deal with now just ship a loaner laptop and I ship it back instead of sending out a technician).

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XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.

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Lenovo To Buy IBM's Server Business For $2.3 Billion

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