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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.
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.
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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.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
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.
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."
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.