IBM pitches bite-sized $135k LinuxONE box for smaller biz types IBM has pushed out a new member of its LinuxONE enterprise-grade Linux lineup that it hopes will appeal to small and medium-sized businesses, but the price tag is unlikely to recommend it to many buyers in this market. The LinuxONE systems are powered by the same Telum processor as IBM's z16 mainframe family, but are built to …
Fewer software licences mainly, as there are vastly fewer cores (typically less than one eighth, sometimes as few as one twelfth).
Also less power usage and other environmentals, which are admittedly only a fraction of the software savings, but still something saved.
And finally, fewer admin costs, which again are admittedly only a fraction of the software savings but again still something saved.
Things like uptime benefits, ease of implementation of integrated facilities which are extra elsewhere (encryption, inferencing, compression) are harder to quantify but still of value.
> Fewer software licences mainly, as there are vastly fewer cores
Fewer cores means less processing power.
One can also get X64 servers with less cores.
Or are you trying to claim her, that one core in this box is as powerful as 8-12 X64 cores?
> Also less power usage and other environmentals,
Citation needed ...
> And finally, fewer admin costs,
Citation urgently needed. Maintanance&Admin cost for specialized hardware typically comes at a premium over bread-and-butter X64 gear.
I don't think that it is 8-12 times the power in terms of raw compute, but one of the things you may note with many VM technologies is that you end up with a lot of the CPU sitting idle a lot of the time. Most stand-alone, and many VM systems over provision each VM, to make sure that they can service the peaks in demand.
The VM and Linux implementation on IBM Mainframes is very, very good at making use of currently unused capacity, as long as you mix your workloads accordingly. It is even better than IBM's PowerVM implementation, which allows unused CPU resource in one LPAR to be 'borrowed' by other LPARs when needed. With Mainframe, the CPU time is not even provisioned to the LPAR unless it is needed.
This means that you can essentially thin-provision your systems, but still get the same amount of work done.
It seems to me that the current wider thinking in system design is that you don't alter resource allocation on demand to VMs, but that you just spin up more VMs to cope with the load. Well, the Linux VM mainframe implementation can do this with astonishingly fast start-up speeds, but it is often more normal to allow the VM itself to have more resource allocated dynamically at peak demand. This hugely simplifies the application design, as you can keep to a single-server application deployment that eliminates all of the load balancing and synchronisation technologies that you need with a distributed implementation, saving you the resource that that requires. And with the high availability, you don't even need to go wide to provide resilience.
The one area where this dynamic resource allocation falls down is that per-CPU software licensing struggles to cope with such a model.
makes me go …. Server is 135k, and lets say savings are 50% to make it easy on my arse… so in 5 years you'd have to have both a 270K spend on x86s (azure maybe?) and a small enough workload you’d only need one…. Unless you're absolutely filthy with lucre for overprovisioning gear, this is a joke with a bad punchline.
maybe Quantum-something, "AI" and the attached fine collection of Snake-Oils explain this price tag.
From the link :
IBM LinuxONE 4 is the latest iteration of IBM LinuxONE enterprise servers with on-chip AI inferencing and industry-first quantum-safe technologies.
Clicking on "quantum-safe" lands you on a full pool of snake oil :
- IBM Quantum Safe Explorer
- IBM Quantum Safe Advisor
- IBM Quantum Safe Remediator
Can run anything every other Linux server can run, too. Just much more expensive...
SMEs, as defined these days, are not tiny businesses. IN the UK it is less than 250 employees, in the US it is a lot more.
So you are getting something that might well run all your server needs for very possibly less than $1,000 per employee. Assume it lasts five years that works out at less than $20 per employee per month.
This time proprietary hardware to run an open source OS with a different processor architecture - more like a PS/2 with a TMS9900 mcpu.
A purchaser would want to ensure that any closed source or legacy binaries (source lost) can be ported or could run under an emulator.
University research environments typically run open source and in house developed code so that wouldn't be a problem. So as the article conjectured this rather than SMEs is the real market although at the price might be a hard sell against a rack of Dell servers. ;)
My guess its an IBM hope that offering their hardware plus their Redhat OS they can flog their software and services on top but I cannot see too many customer wishing to return to IBM's good old days.
It's quite possible to provide a resilient network for these systems. You just have to be prepared for the higher number of network cards that are required to provide two (or more) 'legs' on separate network switches to provide it. It's not that difficult, and in the higher-end midrange systems, we've been doing just that for decades. And of course almost all major components of these systems will be 'hot' swappable.
Also, remember that the I/O is virtualized so not all the LPARs have their own network cards, it is done through the Hypervisor to dedicated I/O servers (in Power land we call them VIOS, or Virtual I/O Servers), and using multiple instances of these, you can come up with some hugely resilient solutions.
Of course, they don't give you physical or geographic isolation, but that is another question entirely.
@Peter_Gathercole
Quote: "...separate network switches ... It's not that difficult ..."
Last time I looked, my network provider only had one POP locally.....and they wanted serious extra money to back-haul to a another (somewhat distant) POP.
It may not be difficult.....but surely $135K is only the start of a MUCH bigger bill.
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