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.

[TellarHK]

As of last night, I actually have a license from IBM to run V5R2 on an older AS/400 system I purchased through Craigslist. I prodded the giant, it woke up just a little tiny bit and managed to decide that giving a hobbyist a license for an obsolete version of the OS/400 platform wasn't going to kill anyone.

It's my hope that I'll be able to help prove that there are more people like me, and indeed, far more talented and curious than me, to show IBM that there's some value to be had for them in opening up access to at least older platforms to enthusiastic hobbyists. The AS/400 platform is an incredibly neat system, and it shows that IBM really does have a niche that nobody else can touch. I've never used AIX, but would love to check that out as well. I hope that some time in the future, I'm not a one-off case when it comes to hobbyists getting an actual license.

But your comment was well timed for me, because I wonder if IBM might be coming around as an institution and realizing that the mindshare gap they have is a problem that it's worth investing a little bit of time and effort in fixing.

Gah, I really wish this article had come up after I had been awake for a while at least. Time for coffee and letting the page refresh in case I can organize my thoughts just a little tiny bit more coherently.

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."

Re:That ship has already sailed.

[jerpyro]

There was no criticism. That's what you (and he) fail to understand. What I'm saying is there's a niche market for these guys and they shouldn't be written off as all bad. Because I pointed out a use case for the hardware for ~10-20% of the cases out there.

For a slashdot car analogy, you are shouting at a Honda Fit owner using his car for grocery runs when everyone knows a Mac truck and dual tractor trailor hitch is better at hauling produce.

For a slashdot car analogy, I'm saying "Stop trying to make multiple runs to home depot packing 30 yards of mulch in the trunk of your Honda Fit when you can just rent a dump truck and save on gas and effort." You don't go to home depot every week, you go three times a year. The Honda Fit is fine for the groceries. Stop a) putting words in my mouth and b) assuming that I'm saying everyone needs a dump truck.

Regarding the RAID6 thing -- I have seen plenty of shops that try to run databases on RAID5/6 and yes it isn't pretty, but that's how they do.

Re:That ship has already sailed.

[RabidReindeer]

Unfortunately, while it's true that CEOs may think that they're getting something special from IBM, those days are long gone.

I worked at a Fortune company in the 1990s with 2 IBM mainframes, but getting OS/2 support was a lost cause. Even when IBM managed to dig up someone competent, they'd leave IBM within months.

I've been working on a project for 2 years that's supposed to work on an iSeries machine, but for some reason the database is really crawling for network clients. IBM finally put someone on the case back in March, but has only half-heartedly helped. Still nothing usable.

The sale rep may roll up in a Mercedes, but the sad truth is that the actual work has been handed off to the cheapest people they could hire. It was really frustrating back in 1996 when I could easily find help for Linux, which had no major corporate supporter at the time, than I could get help for OS/2, with allegedly the support of one of the largest computer companies in the world.

I believe in paying for quality, but where's the quality?

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.

Re:Workstations ?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has licensed the POWER 8 CPU under a program called OpenPOWER. It being touted as being similar to ARM licensing. The last I saw, Tyan was planning to release an single socket POWER 8 ATX motherboard. http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/04/28/inside-google-tyan-power8-server-boards/

Re:Workstations ?

[psergiu]

Yes, almost surely IBM won't alow AIX to run on those boards.
Linux can run on any old x86 cheapie - there's nothing useful to do with a Power 8 CPU running Linux:

- Are you able to learn something that can be applied to big-iron Enterprise IBM hardare ? No.
- Are you able to run any 3rd party commercial software on that Power8 Linux box ? No - most 3rd party Linux commercial software only provides x86 binaries. Sometimes ARM.
- Are you able to do the exactly same Linuxy things with a cheaper x86 machine ? Yes.

Yes, it's a new and exciting CPU, some hobyists will buy this - but for most of them, after a couple of months, the Tyan power 8 machine will remain unused or will be downgraded to a "seldom used server in the corner" as it's less usefull than a Raspberry Pi.

Re:"2-socket system"

[Junta]

a 4-U box with sixteen processors in it that a cloud provider could cost-justify

As virtualization became 'cool', people said 'look how many instances you can cram on these gigantic boxes'. This quickly became 'how many instances am I going to lose if this goes down' or 'how many do I have to live migrate to service this thing?'. The cost advantages of scale with a larger box are quickly offset by practical issues. As such, if you need that much memory in a single system, those sort of boxes are still very valued (in-memory databases and some particular sorts of modeling for example). If the workload naturally fits into more nodes of smaller size, it frequently makes sense to opt for the higher node count. There is of course different break points depending on judgement calls, but most places seem to think of two sockets as about the sweet spot.

Re:Are they available in the cloud?

[bored]

If you go to IBM conferences you will find a fair amount of talk on this very topic by 3rd party vendors. There are probably a dozen vendors that want to provide AS400/iSeries cloud instances, but IBM won't let them because it violates the terms of the IBM i license which is tied to a hardware instance.

Plus, the whole software ecosystem piggybacks on the same idea, (often based on machine capabilities). This means that even if you can rent an iSeries for an hour its likely your software vendor won't license you their application.

So, while it is entirely possible, IBM seems to be dragging their feet on the license issues, and the vendors seems to be in a chicken/egg situation.

Re:Are they available in the cloud?

[Penguinisto]

I can vouch for this one - the whole LPAR/IVM set is licensed in such a way that makes it effing impossible to be a 3rd-party VAR for the things.

Then again, I'd hate to be the sorry mofo that either a) had to manage the things, or b) had to write a web-based wrapper to track and tie together individual iSeries/i5/AS400-based IVM interfaces (*shudder*).

(no, seriously, I'd much prefer to do that with Solaris/Sparc Logical Domains, if only because LDOMS can be way more easily handled from the command prompt, and thus scriptable...)