CentOS - Oct 2018 - IBM buying RedHat

> On 30/10/2018 14:40, Simon Matter wrote:
>>> On 30/10/2018 06:46, Simon Matter wrote:
>>>>> On 10/29/18 1:55 AM, Simon Matter wrote:
>>>>>> To me it seems like, if they are smart, they will try
to push IBM
>>>>>> POWER
>>>>>> and RedHat Linux together to establish real competition
in the
>>>>>> hardware
>>>>>> market again (and of course don't forget to keep
Fedora/CentOS
>>>>>> alive)!
>>>>> Er, RHEL has been running on Power for a very long time. 
The fastest
>>>>> supercomputer in the world is Power9 + RHEL.
>>>> What I meant is that POWER could become a competitor for
Intel/AMD
>>>> based
>>>> servers. We're now running AMD EPYC servers with
64Cores/128Threads
>>>> and
>>>> we
>>>> didn't find any POWER system which could compete in this
area.
>>> As a matter of interest, did you look at IBM's own Power
Systems (IBM
>>> System i, AS/400, System p, as was)? They promote some of these
models
>>> as having very powerful processing capabilities but I wonder how
they
>>> compare in practice with Epyc or Xeon systems.
>> I always had the impression that those IBM systems were priced in a
>> different range from what we were interested in. And I know that I
>> didn't
>> find any price listed online when looking for POWER servers from IBM
>> last
>> time - and I know what that means :-)
>
> Yup, I thought they'd be eye-wateringly expensive.
>
> Nevertheless, they are just rackmount servers, much like the kinds of
Are you sure, has this changed? In the past time when I had to do with
iSeries, they even had their own rack size, no chance to put them into a
standard server rack.
> x86-64 servers you can buy from Dell, Lenovo, HPE, Tyan, Gigabyte, etc.
> Better CPUs and buses but otherwise quite similar.
>
>> If they came back now with something like their deprecated X86 servers
>> (Netfinity, System x) but on POWER, that could be interesting.
>
> Haven't the IBM x86 servers gone to Lenovo now?
>
> As far as I can see, IBM Power Systems *are* in effect what you are
> looking for, i.e. a Power-based server to run Linux (or AIX or IBM i  if
> you prefer) -- well, that's how IBM would see it I think. They already
> support Linux on Power Systems. But I don't think they are going to
> undercut themselves, sadly.
I agree the Power System L922 looks promising, but I'm afraid the
"Please
contact us for pricing" still means the prices are eye watering. The
problem is that there is almost no competition in the POWER server market
which results in higher prices. IBM has the chance to change this now.

Regards,
Simon

On 30/10/2018 17:14, Simon Matter wrote:
> Are you sure, has this changed? In the past time when I had to do with
> iSeries, they even had their own rack size, no chance to put them into a
> standard server rack.
Ah, I must admit that I didn't look at rack sizes.
> I agree the Power System L922 looks promising, but I'm afraid the
"Please
> contact us for pricing" still means the prices are eye watering. The
> problem is that there is almost no competition in the POWER server market
> which results in higher prices.
Yup. When I looked at IBM Power machines before (maybe about a year ago,
not sure), there was actually a pricing tool on the website. You could
go through various options for machines (GPUs, CPUs, storage, memory,
etc.) and get a price. Annoyingly I didn't record detailed pricing info
but, as I recall, the prices were painful but not totally out of
comparison with high end x86-64 servers from HPE and the like. I wish
I'd kept the quotes now.
> IBM has the chance to change this now.
It would be nice if they would. But I think it be a very big step for
them to willingly reduce prices unless and until other vendors can
undercut them in a large enough scale. But it seems that a lot of people
in larger businesses still like the security of "IBM" (even if they
choose to run Linux on the boxes).


-- 
Mark Rousell

Mark Rousell wrote:
> On 30/10/2018 17:14, Simon Matter wrote:
<snip>
> Yup. When I looked at IBM Power machines before (maybe about a year ago,
> not sure), there was actually a pricing tool on the website. You could go
> through various options for machines (GPUs, CPUs, storage, memory, etc.)
> and get a price. Annoyingly I didn't record detailed pricing info but,
as
> I recall, the prices were painful but not totally out of
> comparison with high end x86-64 servers from HPE and the like. I wish
I'd
> kept the quotes now.
>
>> IBM has the chance to change this now.
>>
>
> It would be nice if they would. But I think it be a very big step for
> them to willingly reduce prices unless and until other vendors can undercut
> them in a large enough scale. But it seems that a lot of people in larger
> businesses still like the security of "IBM" (even if they choose
to run
> Linux on the boxes).
>
Unless I'm misremembering, these are midway between small server and
mainframe. I just did a search, and only found used systems, never new,
and they were all "refurbed", starting at $1500, and going up to
$22k...
and still refurbed.

I think my guess of new, > $100k is about right.

        mark