Posts by David W Johnson

IBM lifts the veil on Power7 chips

T2 beating Power .. waiting to see results

Not that I don't believe vendors blogs because they are always right, but it is interesting that spec.org site hasn't posted SUN's latest SPECint_rate2006 results. I can't find any new results for the T5440 or the T5240 servers on the actual spec site (sorry, not going to read companies A blog against company B). The only spec info regarding SUN in the month of Jul-09 is the Sun Blade 6048. So are they waiting to post this new info on the spec website?

The only thing I see is the old spec result. I like to compare apples to apples if possible since benchmarks stress the cpu, memory and compiler. So looking at the old results, not sure who would be better. The current info on spec.org website for the Sun T5540 result had twice as much memory than the Power 550 box so if the 550 box had the same amount of memory, would it be faster, slower, I'm not sure. Same thing goes for the T5240, twice as much memory than the Power 520 (even though I would argue why you would buy a low end box like the T5240 or 520 when you could get a Intel Nehalem box from HP, IBM or even SUN for less money).

Does it really matter now? SUN systems road map is cloudy at best so most UNIX shops will be migrating from either HP or IBM. It was nice to have a 3 UNIX vendors competing for customers dollars, but now the sun has faded for SUN.

Apple's panties in bunch over Microsoft ads

PC's are cheaper but my time is worth more

I'm myself, am a big UNIX/Linux user so I run Linux on a couple second hand laptops from IBM or HP. For the most part, these laptops work fine.

For my family, I switched from a so so PC hardware running Windows to a iMac. Working in IT all day long (Storage Admin working on EMC/HDS/IBM gear) I just got tired of coming home and working on the PC regarding some stupid issue. Of course it didn't happen every day but enough to drive me crazy. So I decided to get a iMac for my family to use. I suppose if I got better hardware on my family PC running Windows I might not have had as many issues, but the iMac has turn out to be solid.

IBM's DS8000 getting thin provisioning

Just bought the XIV last month

I'm definitely going to give IBM a call to upgrade my XIV. It won't be in production until late August but I like to see how the array handles a module going offline, adding new processor and bringing it back online. Not much data on the XIV yet so unfortunately I can't see how long it would take for the other 168 disk to sync up the other 12 drives in the module.

King Larry launches Oracle-Sun combo at Big Blue, Cisco

I'm worried about STK support

We had StorageTek before SUN acquired them and SUN support was never as good as the StorageTek support. The StorageTek CE's are still the same (will less now since Sun can some) but getting to the CE's was sometimes a chore.

So I hope Oracle will at least be a little bit better than Sun on the StorageTek gear.

IBM smacks rivals with 5.0GHz Power6 beast

Please reread the article!!

As already stated by Anonymous Coward, the p595 5GHz system with 64 cores is air cooled. The only pSeries system (or POWER or whatever IBM is calling it this month) is the 575 unit is water cooled. And just for the record, it was already water cooled when it had POWER 5+ chips. It is only design for certain customers.

Any other IBM POWER system is are cooled!!

Regarding the p595, besides the cost ...ouch, I for one would like to see how it performs against a HP Superdome. It would be interesting to see the numbers against SUN M9000, even though I suspect it would smack the M9000.

IBM taunts Sun, HP and VMware with $40 PowerVM hypervisor

Sun does have some nice hardware

BUT ... Believe it or not, IBM has some nice hardware as well w/ some cool software that comes with it. The one reason I'm looking forward to the Live Partition Mobility because it would make my downtimes much easier. Matter of fact in a few weeks we need to migrate a server to a new SUN M5000 and unfortunately have to spend a weekend doing this. Lukily it is part of a VCS cluster so not as much downtime to the users (just an inconvenience to me), but bouncing them a few times is a royal PAIN!!

For your info, when you do purchase a pSeries box, the partioning comes FREE. It's just the extra's you have to pay for like VIO.

Love the Live Partition Mobility idea

We are switching EMR's and chose a EMR that could run on AIX, HP-UX or Solaris. The Live Partition Mobility technology is a big reason why we are leaning towards AIX (well, the CPU speed doesn't hurt either).

IBM grills HP with 4.7GHz Power6-based box

Can't wait for Power6 and the Rock

We currently have power5 boxes and since the power consumption is about the same, can't wait to get these boxes. Which would most likely be early next year.

When SUN releases the rock, we would be set. We will have our web servers (SUN) while also having our backend servers (IBM).