IBM chases HP (and Sun) with tiny mem prices In an effort to boost the amount of money that IBM is getting from competitive takeouts of Unix systems from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, Big Blue has taken a sharp machete to the memory prices on its Power Systems, reducing prices by between 28 and 70 per cent. The Power Systems line of servers is based on IBM's …
We were a koolaide Solaris shop and about two years ago went true blue.
Power performance and PowerVM gave us the ability to replace 250 servers with only four Power6 systems. We saved enough with our Oracle maintenance and avoiding new licenses the p570's we bought were essentially free.
We used to drink koolaide to stay up at night for our midnight planned outages, now with partition mobility we sleep.
The Oracle/Sun drama is interesting, but we have never been happier. We have shifted our resources from 70% on maintaining old systems to 70% deploying new solutions.
This is a great story because the power cores and PowerVM is so powerful we are now at 24GB per core. The down side of incredible core performance and great virtualization technology is you need more memory to house the hundreds of virtual systems. It's certainly better than have 300 systems with dedicated resources.
Cheers from the UK!
Hey - "Cheers from the UK!" ...love to write THAT story up (grin). shandy@us.ibm.com if you'd be willing to do a reference. (might now use the koolaid pun but we can have fun with it). Would be great for our next launch ...Good to have happy clients and also you "get it" on the more workloads can be driven if we make bigger memory configs more affordable (seems like "By exit..quit" feels the same). I'd be happy with a simple quote to put on some sales charts all the way up to a full case study and press release and or web video......and happy to give you a personal Power7 disclosure in return. Scott Handy - VP WW Strategy, Marketing, and Sales Support, IBM Power Systems.
What the hell were you thinking? Running hundreds of virtual machines in a *NIX environment - You may remember that the whole point of *NIX is that it scales out without having to run each application in a VM, and that you can isolate each user from everyone else...
Perhaps you come from a Windows (shudder) background. You got the replacing 250 servers with 4 servers bit right, but really! 100's of VMs, with their associated overhead - Perhaps you should have saved a bit of your money for some independent (not IBM) advice. AIX may not be everyone's favourite *NIX, but it generally just works.
"We used to drink koolaide to stay up at night for our midnight planned outages, now with partition mobility we sleep." I note, with interest, that your post was timed at 04:41 GMT - It was not modded until 11 hours later?
Don't get too giddy - for every 'koolaid tale' like that I can send you a tale of just how much pain and suffering IBM POWER kit (the name presumably relates to the two companies coining it in?) and AIX (aches?) causes me and my colleagues in our daily worklife and just how much pain its causing out of work.
We've nearly all got partners threatening divorce due to power/aix dumping core whenever the whim takes it.
Look at you getting signed up as reference - but anyone who has seen any IBM marketing will probably suspect that you already are as that statement about moving from 70% managing systems to 70% innovation is a classic IBM marketing statement. Plus who in the UK drinks Koolaide?? It's a sad state of affairs when Scott Handy has to come onto The Register and have conversations with himself to publicise an IBM price cut. A 70% permanent price cut, eh! Just goes to show how much IBM has been creaming off its' Power customers for so long!
Of course, the fact that DDR3-quipped Tukzilla is just due early next year had nothing to do with IBM's decision to drop prices on the DDR2-equipped Power6+.....
And, yes, you never can have too much memory! Until you need to boot with a full memory check on, at which point you really start to hate those large memory systems.
Last I heard from Lorraine Bartlett was Intel will announce it in April and systems will not be available for three months later which makes second half of 2010 at the earliest. I am so disappointed nu Intel...they sucked in HP then starved Itanium. Given their current Xeon success I wonder if they is really just Windows/OS2 just on the hardware front and HP is the one who got burned. How Intel gets a pass on this debacle I will never understand.
This is deja vu all over again,
Ingomar
is there not a legal way to make this US companies to adhere to some price regulations ? this leads to lot of un-ethical pricing and leads to corruption . i.e it is easy for IBM or anything with this kind of price model to make a unsuspecting customer beleive they are getting best deal when they are offered even 20-30% discount, without knowing this companies can even offer 99% discount if pressed .
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
