[CentOS] IBM buying RedHat

Mark Rousell
2018-10-30T16:14:16Z

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
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.

--
Mark Rousell