Yeah, the responsibility for your IT is yours. But being responsible for something isn't the same as doing it yourself. If your expertise is limited, being responsible means not doing it yourself, but instead delegating to somebody with more expertise than you. One solution is to hire an expert. Another is to outsource.
Now, you can hire an "expert" or sign an outsourcing provider and still get screwed. That doesn't mean that you should have done everything yourself — you can't. It means you made a bad choice. It's something we all do. And that's something else you can't magic away.
AIX is still IBM's premier UNIX based OS for the enterprise.
I'm sure it's a great OS. But is anybody buying it? There's certainly no place for it in the cloud-oriented data center.
Anybody who's worked in the computer industry for any length of time knows that "great technology" is not the same as "stuff people want to buy". Computer history is littered with the corpses of products that were technologically wonderful but which couldn't find a market.
AIX was launched in 1986. This was a very fortuitous time; on the one hand, it was a modern Unix-style (being Unix!) OS at a time when people were beginning to realize how sucky existing OSs were; on the other hand it had those magic three letters at a time when no other computer company could even get in the front door at most companies. (When I first got into computing 90% of all computers were made by IBM. That was only just beginning to change in 1986.) It's most unsuprising that AIX still has a lot of momentum. But does it have anything like the mindshare of Linux or Windows? It does not. And all those cool features aren't going to change that. I say again, it's a legacy OS. Sorry.
it would be nice if POWER returned to Apple as well - both iPads and Airbooks.
Do you see that happening? Apple must have had a lot of motivation to make the painful transition from POWER to commodity. The transition back would be just as painful, and I don't see their motivation.
x64 owns the desktop and the data center. ARM owns the mobile space. Anybody who thinks that's going to change any time soon as a bad case of the if-onlys.
It was used as a desktop chip. (Don't recall a lot of mobile devices in 1987.) What prevented it from going into a rack-mount server? Lack of customers, I should think.
A lot of traditional file server roles in small businesses have been replaced by ARM-based NAS appliances over the past few years,
If you're connecting to my web site or my cloud services, you don't know what hardware I'm running on, but you DO care that it's fast enough to meet your needs. So why would you care whether my hardware is x64 compatible as long as your x64 systems talk to it just fine?
Of course I don't care. But I'm not the person who's building the infrastructure that makes this web application work. And that person wants commodity systems: lower upfront cost, lower TCO.
IBM Power systems also run Linux.
As I already pointed out, everything runs Linux. But how many people are buying POWER to run Linux?
Well, at least IBM is trying to push Linux on POWER itself. At Sun, we left Linux on SPARC to Canonical. But I don't see either taking off any time soon.
I guess you can probably run Linux on anything designed in the last 20 years. But how many people buy Power 7 systems to run Linux? Very few, I suspect.
Dumb of me to classify AIX as a mainframe OS. But it's still a legacy OS.
Yeah, my obsession with the x64 versus everything else war is becomming less and less relevant. Mobile devices are indeed about ARM (though Intel would like to change that). And I agree with you that web applications are chiping away at Windows dominance.
But ARM servers? People have been trying to sell those as long as ARM has been around. ARM advocates are insisting that the latest improvements will give them the edge they need, but the factors that keep the data centers full of x64 systems have not changed.
You honestly think that nobody cares about x64 compatibility any more? When cloud providers like Amazon and Salesforce start buying non-x64 systems, I'll believe that. And even if it were true, we'd still have the lower cost of commodity architectures.
So, IBM sells a bunch of different Power 7 systems. Tell me, what OSs do they run? AIX and IBM i. Any system that runs these exists for legacy support. AIX is IBM's Unix for mainframes, while IBM i is the latest iteration in a series of proprietary OSs that began with the one written for IBM's first minicomputer, the System/3. We're talking a system that was released in 1969. When they start selling POWER systems that run Linux, then we can talk.
I'm not even going to consider the CPUs used in gaming consoles. I guess it makes sense that x64 wouldn't dominate in systems that need to be hyperoptimized. But those of us who are willing to wait a year or two for the latest GTA to be ported to the PC just don't care.
What you're really saying is not that TCO isn't an issue, but that cloud technology isn't mature enough to provide alternatives for these people. And I agree, there are a lot of PC applications that still don't have good cloud alternatives.But that doesn't eliminate the TCO issue, it just means that these people can't do anything about it. If these people could switch to the cloud, not doing so would be pretty expensive.
Please note that I am not a "everybody on the cloud, now!" zealot. (Except for people who make their living selling cloud and pseudo-cloud products, nobody is.) I'm just a nitpicker who reacts every time he reads a post with the usual "own your data!" and "the cloud is just servers" fallacies.
Since this is Slashdot, let's do a car analogy. Imagine that it's 100 years ago and we're arguing over the TCO of cars versus horses. You might point out all the applications where cars couldn't hope to replace horses. And you'd be right: horses would be an important form of traction even in industrial societies for another 50 years. But the trend away from horses was clear even then. There were a lot of reasons for this, but TCO was an important one — like servers, horses require a lot of TLC.
Glacial indeed, if they haven't already done it. Like the other 99% of the industry.
One has to be really dense not to see this trend. ALPHA is gone. MIPS is only used in embedded devices. Itanium and POWER are strictly legacy products. And yet people still believe that SPARC can survive in the server space.
I'd be sad too if I still worked at Sun. But not only does the failure of this product line no longer affect me, even abandoning SPARC completely would not save it. Computers are Dead.
Before Fowler became an Oracle employee, he was in charge of the hardware division at Sun. And before that, he was in charage of x64 systems. I was working there at the time, and the word from on high was that putting the x64 guy in charge was a signal about our future direction.
Which of course, didn't happen. Sun's sales channels continued to view x64 systems as a way of migrating people to SPARC vis Solaris-on-x64. Which all our customers, who were already heavily invested in Windows and Linux, had no interest in. My big hope for the Oracle takeover was that Oracle's sales org (aside from being bigger than all of Sun) would be smarter than that and push x64 systems.
But Oracle has dratically reduced the models of x64 systems they sell. Officially, that's about a leaner product line and ending the special relationship with AMD. But I'm beginning to expect that the SPARC koolaid is as popular in Oracle as it was in Sun.
And which specific customizations do you need. Not customizations you think are cool, mind you. As the parent said to the 5 year old, you need to learn the difference between need and want.
Yeah, go with what's proven; whether that's hosted or local.
Agreed. But if you have a choice between a proven local app and a proven cloud app, you go with the cloud app to save money. That's a decision that the CEO of HP just made by ditching existing CRM and HR applications for their cloud equivalents. Which is ironic, because she's assuming (correctly) that using the very PCs and servers she sells for this purpose is too expensive
Then you're a techie who thinks nothing of managing his own IT stack. Imagine you're a small business owner with basic IT skills and without the resources to hire a proper IT wonk. Or you're an IT manager supporting thousands of users who suddenly discovers he has to upgrade every single system in order to continue supporting the app on which everybody depends.
Yeah, salespeople make up all kinds of bullshit. But they didn't make up TCO.
. Currently it's a postfix/MailScanner/SpamAssassin/sqlgrey/dovecot/sasl/davical/asterisk/freepbx stack, but I've also never seen Sogo before, so thanks for linking that. I've been meaning to integrate Fumambol/SyncML and that does it built-in, so cool.
So, how much time do you spend tinkering with your IT, and how much does that take away from growing your business? If your primary goals are to geek out and fight the good "software freedom" fight, well, that's your choice. But most small business owners have to give priority to making the payroll, covering the rent, paying themselves enough to live on, and other boring stuff.
Hey, I remember when gas went past 50 cents. A lot of gas stations had pumps with electro-mechanical meters that couldn't handle those prices, so they posted signs saying telling people that the pump displayed 1/2 the actual sales prices.
At the time I lived in the GTE service area. They were notorious for the sheer unreliability of their network. Dropped calls, bad sound quality.
People in AT&T service areas got better service, but paid through the nose for it. If you lived in an area with "zoned calling" you could bankrupt yourself just dialing across town. Hooking up non-Western Electric hardware to your phone line was illegal. To hook up your computer, you had to lease (it wasn't for sale) a "data set" from the local phone company. The thing was huge and expensive. accoustic couplers were invented to get around this,.
Not feeling nostalgic at all.
I live in Portland. We don't have lawns, we have rain gardens.
The problem with the "keep your data and apps where you can see them" approach is that the TCO is horrendous.
Yeah, Google's cloud applications suck. That's due to Google ADHD issues, not the fact that it's cloud hosted. Tell me you've never been screwed over by a traditional application whose publisher lost interest in it.
It's perfectly true that some cloud applications are too immature and not ready to replace their traditional counterparts. Office applications (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.) are certainly there, at least for serious users. But the best CRM and HR solutions are cloud-based, and have been for some time. And the companies behind them are here to stay.
When I needed to call out, I used my cell. Sales, marketing, and support did indeed have phones. But this was a small cloud technology company, and they had the notion that internal IT should be as lean as possible.
Desktop phones are one of those things that stay around through bureaucratic and social inertia. On my previous gig, the guy I was working for forgot to order a phone put in my cube. No biggie — the only thing I needed it for was dialing into conference calls, and I could use Skype for that. But upper management decreed that I had to have a phone, so I got a typical desktop setup. Had a complicated, antiquated hand-free device that I never came to terms with. And I kept getting robo debt-collection calls meant for the person who'd had the extension before me.
Absolutely correct. Alas, outsourcing any kind of IT is anathema to the typical geek.
Once worked at small ISP (started in a guy's garage, and still pretty much his personal operation) where everything was internally developed: phone system, CRM, server status software... Needless to say, using these do-it-yourself tools was a nightmare.
Subtle hint that the salespeople lied? Taking a week to fix a simple config issue.
You mention not being able to email large attachments? Internal email servers tend to run short of space, because of the usual cost dweeb issues. Thus every internal server I ever used filters out anything over 1 MB. If you find the right external provider, you can specify what does and does not get filtered. Though you really should have an SFTP server or a file sharing account or something.
Right, I misremembered the naming system. When I was there, all the 4-RU systems were AMD, and I misremembered the first digit as representing the physical size of the system. It's actually the second digit.
My anecdote had a point. 'The point happens to disagree with your prejudices, but it's there.
I've already rebutted your "The cloud is just..." arguments, but you're simply ignoring them, and coming back with the same arguments.Not a productive line of discussion. I'll just point out that this "marketspeak" fantasy you dismiss so glibly is keeping me and a lot of other people employed. So, go back to your buggy whips — I'll let the marketplace speak for itself.
Slashdot Mirror
So, not voting for Romney?
Yeah, the responsibility for your IT is yours. But being responsible for something isn't the same as doing it yourself. If your expertise is limited, being responsible means not doing it yourself, but instead delegating to somebody with more expertise than you. One solution is to hire an expert. Another is to outsource.
Now, you can hire an "expert" or sign an outsourcing provider and still get screwed. That doesn't mean that you should have done everything yourself — you can't. It means you made a bad choice. It's something we all do. And that's something else you can't magic away.
AIX is still IBM's premier UNIX based OS for the enterprise.
I'm sure it's a great OS. But is anybody buying it? There's certainly no place for it in the cloud-oriented data center.
Anybody who's worked in the computer industry for any length of time knows that "great technology" is not the same as "stuff people want to buy". Computer history is littered with the corpses of products that were technologically wonderful but which couldn't find a market.
AIX was launched in 1986. This was a very fortuitous time; on the one hand, it was a modern Unix-style (being Unix!) OS at a time when people were beginning to realize how sucky existing OSs were; on the other hand it had those magic three letters at a time when no other computer company could even get in the front door at most companies. (When I first got into computing 90% of all computers were made by IBM. That was only just beginning to change in 1986.) It's most unsuprising that AIX still has a lot of momentum. But does it have anything like the mindshare of Linux or Windows? It does not. And all those cool features aren't going to change that. I say again, it's a legacy OS. Sorry.
it would be nice if POWER returned to Apple as well - both iPads and Airbooks.
Do you see that happening? Apple must have had a lot of motivation to make the painful transition from POWER to commodity. The transition back would be just as painful, and I don't see their motivation.
x64 owns the desktop and the data center. ARM owns the mobile space. Anybody who thinks that's going to change any time soon as a bad case of the if-onlys.
ARM2 was definitely a mobile / desktop chip.
It was used as a desktop chip. (Don't recall a lot of mobile devices in 1987.) What prevented it from going into a rack-mount server? Lack of customers, I should think.
A lot of traditional file server roles in small businesses have been replaced by ARM-based NAS appliances over the past few years,
Yep.. I own a QNAP.TS-110. Sweet little box.
If you're connecting to my web site or my cloud services, you don't know what hardware I'm running on, but you DO care that it's fast enough to meet your needs. So why would you care whether my hardware is x64 compatible as long as your x64 systems talk to it just fine?
Of course I don't care. But I'm not the person who's building the infrastructure that makes this web application work. And that person wants commodity systems: lower upfront cost, lower TCO.
IBM Power systems also run Linux.
As I already pointed out, everything runs Linux. But how many people are buying POWER to run Linux?
Well, at least IBM is trying to push Linux on POWER itself. At Sun, we left Linux on SPARC to Canonical. But I don't see either taking off any time soon.
You are making my argument for me about the stupidity of a one size fits all policy enforced from outside.
You're right, that's stupid. And I don't even begin to see how I was advocating it.
I guess you can probably run Linux on anything designed in the last 20 years. But how many people buy Power 7 systems to run Linux? Very few, I suspect.
Dumb of me to classify AIX as a mainframe OS. But it's still a legacy OS.
Yeah, my obsession with the x64 versus everything else war is becomming less and less relevant. Mobile devices are indeed about ARM (though Intel would like to change that). And I agree with you that web applications are chiping away at Windows dominance.
But ARM servers? People have been trying to sell those as long as ARM has been around. ARM advocates are insisting that the latest improvements will give them the edge they need, but the factors that keep the data centers full of x64 systems have not changed.
You honestly think that nobody cares about x64 compatibility any more? When cloud providers like Amazon and Salesforce start buying non-x64 systems, I'll believe that. And even if it were true, we'd still have the lower cost of commodity architectures.
So, IBM sells a bunch of different Power 7 systems. Tell me, what OSs do they run? AIX and IBM i. Any system that runs these exists for legacy support. AIX is IBM's Unix for mainframes, while IBM i is the latest iteration in a series of proprietary OSs that began with the one written for IBM's first minicomputer, the System/3. We're talking a system that was released in 1969. When they start selling POWER systems that run Linux, then we can talk.
I'm not even going to consider the CPUs used in gaming consoles. I guess it makes sense that x64 wouldn't dominate in systems that need to be hyperoptimized. But those of us who are willing to wait a year or two for the latest GTA to be ported to the PC just don't care.
What you're really saying is not that TCO isn't an issue, but that cloud technology isn't mature enough to provide alternatives for these people. And I agree, there are a lot of PC applications that still don't have good cloud alternatives.But that doesn't eliminate the TCO issue, it just means that these people can't do anything about it. If these people could switch to the cloud, not doing so would be pretty expensive.
Please note that I am not a "everybody on the cloud, now!" zealot. (Except for people who make their living selling cloud and pseudo-cloud products, nobody is.) I'm just a nitpicker who reacts every time he reads a post with the usual "own your data!" and "the cloud is just servers" fallacies.
Since this is Slashdot, let's do a car analogy. Imagine that it's 100 years ago and we're arguing over the TCO of cars versus horses. You might point out all the applications where cars couldn't hope to replace horses. And you'd be right: horses would be an important form of traction even in industrial societies for another 50 years. But the trend away from horses was clear even then. There were a lot of reasons for this, but TCO was an important one — like servers, horses require a lot of TLC.
Glacial indeed, if they haven't already done it. Like the other 99% of the industry.
One has to be really dense not to see this trend. ALPHA is gone. MIPS is only used in embedded devices. Itanium and POWER are strictly legacy products. And yet people still believe that SPARC can survive in the server space.
I'd be sad too if I still worked at Sun. But not only does the failure of this product line no longer affect me, even abandoning SPARC completely would not save it. Computers are Dead.
Before Fowler became an Oracle employee, he was in charge of the hardware division at Sun. And before that, he was in charage of x64 systems. I was working there at the time, and the word from on high was that putting the x64 guy in charge was a signal about our future direction.
Which of course, didn't happen. Sun's sales channels continued to view x64 systems as a way of migrating people to SPARC vis Solaris-on-x64. Which all our customers, who were already heavily invested in Windows and Linux, had no interest in. My big hope for the Oracle takeover was that Oracle's sales org (aside from being bigger than all of Sun) would be smarter than that and push x64 systems.
But Oracle has dratically reduced the models of x64 systems they sell. Officially, that's about a leaner product line and ending the special relationship with AMD. But I'm beginning to expect that the SPARC koolaid is as popular in Oracle as it was in Sun.
And which specific customizations do you need. Not customizations you think are cool, mind you. As the parent said to the 5 year old, you need to learn the difference between need and want.
Yeah, go with what's proven; whether that's hosted or local.
Agreed. But if you have a choice between a proven local app and a proven cloud app, you go with the cloud app to save money. That's a decision that the CEO of HP just made by ditching existing CRM and HR applications for their cloud equivalents. Which is ironic, because she's assuming (correctly) that using the very PCs and servers she sells for this purpose is too expensive
I'm not convinced that the TCO is "horrendous"
Then you're a techie who thinks nothing of managing his own IT stack. Imagine you're a small business owner with basic IT skills and without the resources to hire a proper IT wonk. Or you're an IT manager supporting thousands of users who suddenly discovers he has to upgrade every single system in order to continue supporting the app on which everybody depends.
Yeah, salespeople make up all kinds of bullshit. But they didn't make up TCO.
. Currently it's a postfix/MailScanner/SpamAssassin/sqlgrey/dovecot/sasl/davical/asterisk/freepbx stack, but I've also never seen Sogo before, so thanks for linking that. I've been meaning to integrate Fumambol/SyncML and that does it built-in, so cool.
So, how much time do you spend tinkering with your IT, and how much does that take away from growing your business? If your primary goals are to geek out and fight the good "software freedom" fight, well, that's your choice. But most small business owners have to give priority to making the payroll, covering the rent, paying themselves enough to live on, and other boring stuff.
Hey, I remember when gas went past 50 cents. A lot of gas stations had pumps with electro-mechanical meters that couldn't handle those prices, so they posted signs saying telling people that the pump displayed 1/2 the actual sales prices.
At the time I lived in the GTE service area. They were notorious for the sheer unreliability of their network. Dropped calls, bad sound quality.
People in AT&T service areas got better service, but paid through the nose for it. If you lived in an area with "zoned calling" you could bankrupt yourself just dialing across town. Hooking up non-Western Electric hardware to your phone line was illegal. To hook up your computer, you had to lease (it wasn't for sale) a "data set" from the local phone company. The thing was huge and expensive. accoustic couplers were invented to get around this,.
Not feeling nostalgic at all.
I live in Portland. We don't have lawns, we have rain gardens.
The problem with the "keep your data and apps where you can see them" approach is that the TCO is horrendous.
Yeah, Google's cloud applications suck. That's due to Google ADHD issues, not the fact that it's cloud hosted. Tell me you've never been screwed over by a traditional application whose publisher lost interest in it.
It's perfectly true that some cloud applications are too immature and not ready to replace their traditional counterparts. Office applications (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.) are certainly there, at least for serious users. But the best CRM and HR solutions are cloud-based, and have been for some time. And the companies behind them are here to stay.
When I needed to call out, I used my cell. Sales, marketing, and support did indeed have phones. But this was a small cloud technology company, and they had the notion that internal IT should be as lean as possible.
Desktop phones are one of those things that stay around through bureaucratic and social inertia. On my previous gig, the guy I was working for forgot to order a phone put in my cube. No biggie — the only thing I needed it for was dialing into conference calls, and I could use Skype for that. But upper management decreed that I had to have a phone, so I got a typical desktop setup. Had a complicated, antiquated hand-free device that I never came to terms with. And I kept getting robo debt-collection calls meant for the person who'd had the extension before me.
Absolutely correct. Alas, outsourcing any kind of IT is anathema to the typical geek.
Once worked at small ISP (started in a guy's garage, and still pretty much his personal operation) where everything was internally developed: phone system, CRM, server status software... Needless to say, using these do-it-yourself tools was a nightmare.
The last time i worked in an office, there was no phone on my desk. If my boss wanted me, he IMed me.
Subtle hint that the salespeople lied? Taking a week to fix a simple config issue.
You mention not being able to email large attachments? Internal email servers tend to run short of space, because of the usual cost dweeb issues. Thus every internal server I ever used filters out anything over 1 MB. If you find the right external provider, you can specify what does and does not get filtered. Though you really should have an SFTP server or a file sharing account or something.
Right, I misremembered the naming system. When I was there, all the 4-RU systems were AMD, and I misremembered the first digit as representing the physical size of the system. It's actually the second digit.
So maybe you should switch to a provider who thinks that a customer who's paying them six figures every month is a customer worth keeping.
My anecdote had a point. 'The point happens to disagree with your prejudices, but it's there.
I've already rebutted your "The cloud is just..." arguments, but you're simply ignoring them, and coming back with the same arguments.Not a productive line of discussion. I'll just point out that this "marketspeak" fantasy you dismiss so glibly is keeping me and a lot of other people employed. So, go back to your buggy whips — I'll let the marketplace speak for itself.