IBM Gearing Up Mega Power 8 Servers For October Launch

darthcamaro (735685) writes "Now that IBM has sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo, it's full steam ahead for IBM's Power business. While Intel is ramping up its next generation of server silicon for a September launch, IBM has its next lineup of Power 8 servers set to be announced in October. "There is a larger than 4U, 2 socket system coming out," Doug Balog, General Manager of Power Systems within IBM's System and Technology Group said. Can IBM Power 8 actually take on x86? Or has that ship already sailed?" At last weekend's Linux Con in Chicago, IBM talked up the availability of the Power systems, and that they are working with several Linux vendors, including recently-added Ubuntu; watch for a video interview with Balog on how he's helping spend the billion dollars that IBM pledged last year on open source development.

Comments

That ship has already sailed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck taking on x86 dirt-cheap, "good enough" servers with exorbitantly costly, closed POWER systems which people cannot buy cheaply enough to play at home with and learn on. Where is the system administration and development user base going to come from? All such attempts by other companies have failed in the past.

Also, good luck getting POWER re-adopted by the system administration cand development community, when AIX and the compilers remain closed and the barrier to entry is really high (they are not easily available).

You priced yourself out of the market, IBM. Old school guys like me have all but retired, and when they do, they want nothing to do with AIX or POWER or IBM.

Who is going to bother jumping through the hoops to learn AIX on old POWER systems bought on ebay when they can get a fully loaded x86 server or put together a PC bucket at home and slap Linux or Joyent's SmartOS and just start learning? Who?

Re:That ship has already sailed.

[jerpyro]

I think you're either a) mistaking me for someone who is invested in seeing these companies succeed, or b) trying to pick a fight. So I will answer this without addressing the manner in which you made your comments and just cut right to your message.

One cannot compete in the market charging exorbitant prices "because it's Snoracle" or "nobody ever got fired for selectin IBM" or "this HP Itanic server has top-of-the-line clock crystal, pay up!" - that does not fly any more.

Unfortunately it does in a lot of places, and here's why:

When your $1800 box goes down, and you've long left the company, where do I go to get enterprise support for it? How do I google for "How to fix Jeff's SmartOS whitebox"? When the CEO is coming at me like a steam roller because our online order entry system is down, where do I point the finger? THAT'S what your $1800 box doesn't provide.

The other scenario is what happens when I want something that has a supported (as in see paragraph above) set of hardware that needs to push tens of millions of iops over infiniband to a dedicated storage array for that box? If I'm spending 50k for a storage array and 20k for switching hardware, you'd better believe I'm going to throw an extra 2k at a server that Oracle or IBM says is certified to work with that equipment and they release-test the drivers. Not everyone is cool with a few commodity hard drives in a RAID 6 because it won't keep up with the database volumes. Yes, for 90% of the worlds buzzfeeds out there serving up dumb top10 lists or sites that survive on crosslinking other things that's fine, but there will always be specialty needs and high volume customers, and that's where these places will find their niche.

I'm not saying that dirt cheap intel boxes aren't the way to go for most cases [and that's exactly why IBM and Oracle struggle to stay competitive], but CEOs think their business is the most important thing in the world. Jeff in IT isn't nearly as good at convincing them that he's got their back as the smooth talking guy with the Oracle polo that rolls up in the Mercedes to golf with him.

Re:That ship has already sailed.

[jerpyro]

1: "The vendor says we needed a DB2 box. Their requirements mandate a certain level of IO performance that doesn't fit within our clustering/standardization scheme. IBM has an off-the-shelf solution for $25k plus 5k/year support, or we can get Jeff to slap something together for $15k."
2: "What's our business case?"
1: "A $300,000 piece of software that runs our ERP system."
2: "What if it goes down?"
1: "If it goes down, we lose $1m a day in revenue."
2: "The IBM thing sounds good to me. I'll have the approvals to you tomorrow."

Workstations ?

[psergiu]

Latest Power workstation had Power 5 CPUs. The should make a new workstation.

No workstations => No small computer labs => Weak interest for the OS/Hardware from sudents & hobyists => Future decline of sales in servers.

Look at HP & all the other commercial Unix vendors - decline in server sales is almost directly related with workstation unavailability in the past ~5 years.

Re:Workstations ?

[ModernGeek]

Yeah, while the demand may be high right now because of large, existing customers, the ones working out of their homes, working out of small labs, and running small businesses (think of apple's roots) will eventually be the ones moving on to the larger challenges, and start working with medium-sized and then fortune-500 businesses.

Unless IBM thinks that people that come from big money, big data, and big education (think of uber) will be the ones to contend in this area.

This is classic IBM, and it will probably never go anywhere. If it does, it will be replaced by someone with the same vision as them, a tall wall between small and enterprise-grade businesses, people, education, and money. Who can blame them? It's very profitable.