The fact that IBM is buying RH isn’t make me weep as much as this statement —
“The open source, enterprise software maker will become a unit of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud division, with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management team and reporting to CEO Ginni Rometty.”
Will the end-user market in all facets (desktop Linux?) continue to be supported?
—
——————————————
MzK
“Less is MORE.”
Le 28/10/2018 à 22:10, Albert McCann a écrit :
Red Hat would stay as a distinct entity inside IBM. IBM has also contributed to Free software, and especially Linux kernel. I don’t know how bad it is and the implications for CentOS…
Alain
—
Administrateur Système/Réseau C2N (ex LPN) Centre de Nanosciences et Nanotechnologies (UMR 9001)
Avenue de La vauve, 91920 Palaiseau Tel : 01-70-27-06-88
IBM screwed up with the purchase of the Weather.com properties, including Weather Underground. For more than a decade, WU benefitted from thousands of people with personal weather stations feeding local data to WU. IBM now plans to kill the existing WU weather API (which also was the Weather.com API), and gives the appearance of screwing over all those personal weather folks. While IBM now claims that they will have minimal ‘free’ access ‘to their own data’, a huge number of the PW folks have bailed and left, as IBM won’t even tell them if they can even have the three-day forecast, let alone the ten-day forecast, plus the weather alerts data.
The WU API will die 12-31-18, and still there is no announcement as to what and how the PW people will be allowed to access the API. this leaves a bunch of downstream users who had free API keys, which WU gave out to nonprofit users up until last April or so. It also screws over the paid API users, and looks like the costs for commercial API access will drastically increase.
The IBM rep on the message forum still claims that IBM will support the PW data providers, but will not answer what exactly that will provide to those PW providers.
As they’ve completely screwed over users providing free data, I can see them attempting to do the same to the ‘free software’ company where they plan to monetize the software and data the same way as the weather data.
At least IBM is a far more attractive buyer than the evil Oracle, well known for killing OSS companies as a strategy. Also Microsoft has ben mentioned as possible buyer of Red Hat, that would be much worse too.
So, let’s not be too pessimistic and give IBM a fair chance. IBM
certainly does not have a bad track record on open source and as a technology-driven company, at least a much better track record than most if not all other potential buyers.
Of course. For the next several $timeframes, it will all be speculation, not worth a shovelful of earth.
I’d be happy, nay, over-the-freakin’-moon, to be proven wrong.
If the trajectory follows the Oracle ™ pattern, the first change will be that things that you used to be able to download unencumbered will need an IBM username and password. Everyone who is nervous will try to reassure themselves and others that this isn’t a fundamental change, that it’s really just a minor inconvenience, we can still get what we need. I think our English chums call this “the thin end of the wedge.”
I’ll stop now and wait with everyone else, silently, to see what happens. But I can’t resist an old joke from long ago when there was a rumor about IBM buying Apple (I think this was in the late 80s or 90s):
Q: What do you get when you cross IBM with Apple?
A: IBM
Cheers, Zube
Actually, it could have been *much8 worse: *Oracle* could have bought RH.
That *really* would have been an order of magnitude worse.
mark
Not for Canonical…
I like the fact that it was IBM who bought RedHat. I remember several good things about IBM:
1. Postfix. Vietse Venema wrote it at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and IBM was really happy to release MTA written with security in mind under IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software license – for everybody to use.
2. Does anybody still remember OS/2 which lost userbase to MS Windows for workgroups, but IBM still supported it for quite long period of time. And OS/2 was much better IMHO.
I bet many people can add other great things about IBM.
All in all I’m not unhappy IBM bough RedHat, but will be quite unhappy if IBM sells RedHat to somebody else after some time.
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That’s one example but I think there is much more in the history of IBM
when looking back.
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)!
Regards, Simon
As a long-time OS/2 user, I do remember, and damn what a miserable life that was. As soon as I had wound my BBS down (which was running on Maximus on OS/2), I had switched my home server around to Linux since I preferred it way way more. Using any new hardware, or a decent graphics card was a constant struggle and IBM wouldn’t care much.
Support as in life support is as good as none.
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.
Also, looking at TOP500 list there are not so many POWER systems anymore. IBM could change this now.
Regards, Simon
Yeah…..I guess that’s one way to look at it.
My biggest worry? Is I’ve placed so much time and effort “getting to know” Fedora and its intricacies, idiosyncrasies, its ins and outs…dealt with ridicule on this very same list when I first started, have “cut my teeth” on learning VERY hard lessons about certain syntax in the Terminal and what NOT to type…….only to have that all “taken”
away from me at the whim of IBM. It just seems unfair. I’m hoping like H3LL that the developers @ Fedora are seriously thinking about forking
“Just In Case”!? I mean they could still use the .RPM extensions, and possibly even still pull their code from RHEL, but at least they would be autonomous and wouldn’t have to rely on IBM’s good will in order to keep on churning out what….to me…is the best Linux distro on the planet! As I write this….I’m eyeballing the spare ThinkPad T-410 that I’ve neglected since I have Fedora running on a Dell XPS, and I’m thinking its time to get “back to my roots” and to find a distro I can put on that device and run without concern….I’ve heard some decent things about this “Pop-OS” which comes with System76’s hardware. Maybe I’ll give that a spin……then like I had said before…there’s always Debian plain vanilla…with maybe MATE or Cinnamon?…..or else its going to have to be where I buckle down and finally learn all there is to know about LFS and Arch Linux and then move on to one of those…(God!…..at 47!?….its like how can I POSSIBLY start over again!?…) and THIS is the kind of turmoil that ensues when a corporation buys a fully functioning open course company!
EGO II
version 8 coming up? – must be due soon …. Love learning new stuff, it never gets old (pun intended). sorry for the noise, but couldn’t resist, must be the age ….
Hahahaah!…..good one! Now THAT made me smile!…..thanks for the laugh! Gotta remember to not always be the Doom & Gloom bearer! :o)!
Guess I’ll just keep on truckin’ with F29…and hope all goes well.
EGO II
Am 2018-10-30 08:06, schrieb Eddie G. O’Connor Jr.:
I think you seriously underestimate the amount of influence and sheer man-power RedHat brings to Linux – and IBM, too.
There’s a reason RHEL is an enterprise-distribution – and Debian et.al. aren’t (and never will, outside their niches).
RedHat writes ton of code that is needed for Linux to be truly
“Enterprise” and that exists nowhere else. The above statistics is only the kernel – but Enterprise Linux is so much more than a kernel. That code isn’t going to write itself, nor is somebody else going to pick up unless someone will pay the bill. Maybe somebody can fork all the code and maintain it for a while – but to stay relevant, there must be further development, a roadmap …
Sure, there’s Google and a couple of other companies – but they really only write for themselves and as much as people try cargo-culting them, most companies aren’t Google and their use-case hardly matches anyone else’s.
I still remember when SAP announced that their engineers had ported their ERP to Linux – a sparetime-project at the beginning – and they were making it a tier 1 platform. That was over 20 years ago.
Linux has come a long way.
But it is also entirely possible that CentOS 8 will be the last one to come out. Before a corporate agenda will “merge” it with their general philosophy.
To me it looks pathetic that a lively profitable entity with an entirely different corporate psychology is consumed by big conglomerates. What for?
By the way I am 60 and been following Linux/Linus since Kernel 0.99. Some time before RedHat appeared strong on the scene.
Andreas
True. It has, but still as another poster stated?
“/_But it is also entirely possible that CentOS 8 will be the last one to come out. Before a corporate agenda will “merge” it with their general philosophy. _//_
_//__//_
_//_To me it looks pathetic that a lively profitable entity with an entirely different corporate psychology is consumed by big conglomerates. What for? _//_
_//__//_
_//_By the way I am 60 and been following Linux/Linus since Kernel 0.99. Some time before RedHat appeared strong on the scene.”_//_
_//__//_
_//_Andreas – 10.2018 _/
It might not be a “PROBABLE” scenario…but its is a POSSIBLE one! What would that entail? Just because Red Hat is a strong contributor to the code now….if “Big Daddy” says to pull the plug….who’s to refuse them?…they OWN Red Hat now! And this was my concern, at least as its own entity, RHEL had the luxury of whom to do business with and whom to reject / turn down. Now? They will be “goaded”? into playing with whomever the headmaster SAYS they’re to play with! I dunno….maybe I’m thinking about it too much but it just doesn’t bode well when a company gets bought out with nary a resistance. I guess only time will tell.
EGO Ii
Am 2018-10-30 10:03, schrieb Eddie G. O’Connor Jr.:
Even more profit. Also, borrowing money is still very cheap these days (AFAIK, Amazon has financed most of their expansion – this is only possible because of continuously low interest rates) and companies want to take advantage of that, while low interest rates lasts.
Yes, possible.
As of currently, RedHat isn’t really replaceable.
IBM might sack half of the RHAT devs but that doesn’t mean they could continue to write their code at some other place. That other place would have to pay them, too, and it’s unlikely to be for the same thing as before.
You can clearly see that in the OpenSolaris forks: a lot of people were let go, but none of the forks really took off. The people went elsewhere.
IBM knows all this. There’s likely going to be MSFT-licensing squeeze going to happen in the (somewhat distant) future. And a push to cloud (and OpenShift).
From what I hear, almost all software-vendors are increasing licensing costs next year. Not only MSFT. Everybody that thinks they can get away with raising prices is doing so right now.
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.
IBM’s Power8 and Power9 servers run 8 threads per core, so a 24 core Power 8 server runs 192 threads, as long as the operating system can handle it, you should be fine.
And if you’re looking for major operations running on Power, look no farther than Google…they’re a huge part of the Power consortium and run a huge farm of Power systems on Tyan boards.
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 :-)
If they came back now with something like their deprecated X86 servers
(Netfinity, System x) but on POWER, that could be interesting.
Regards, Simon
Simon Matter wrote:
Um, yep. The AS/400/system 1/whatever is not a small system. It’s what used to be called a mid-frame, not a micro. It’s money.
Back around ’94, I worked at a small software house that had it’s own DOS/VSR/SP mini-mainrame: Looked like a *very* large tower case… and cost $192k. I wouldn’t expect a system 1, if that’s the current name, to be under $100k or $200k, minimum.
mark
Well, Google is in a different situation. They can even request their own modified motherboards and customize so they get exactly what they want. We can not do that in the SME market.
However, the bigger POWER9 CPUs were not available at the time we were looking at it – this has changed now.
Still I wasn’t sure how to compare the real life speed of POWER9 compared to something like the AMD EPYC 7601. And then, will everything work smooth on POWER the same way it does on the AMD? POWER seems still not a first preference arch for CentOS, so how would it impact us? Is it smart to add another CPU arch if we still have to run some X86 code, like in our case SAP MaxDB (which is also available for AIX on POWER but not Linux on POWER)?
In the end we decided for AMD EPYC but kept the POWER thing in mind. Now that IBM announces the purchase of RedHat it just reminded me that this could become interesting again in the future. Let’s see how it goes.
Regards, Simon
Am 2018-10-30 15:53, schrieb Simon Matter:
It probably depends on the workload.
AFAIK, there were a lot of microcode-updates from AMD to fix bugs in the first batches of Threadripper and Epyc.
It was not smooth sailing from the very beginning.
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.
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.
AS/400 -> eServer iSeries -> System i -> Power Systems RS/6000 -> eServer pSeries -> System p -> Power Systems
So the current ‘Power Systems’ range combines what was AS/400 with what was RS/6000. They all use Power CPUs now and run Linux, IBM i, or AIX.
“IBM i” is, of course the operating system previously known as OS/400
and then i5/OS.
Simple, eh. ;-)
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.
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
Yup, it must cost them a pretty penny to maintain all those proprietary operating systems (especially when you include their mainframe ones). I
suspect that Linux will eventually replace i and AIX — eventually. But I bet there are some significant clients who are still willing to pay money to keep them going.
I would add “and FreeBSD” here. Mentioning only one of BSD descendants, the one with largest userbase.
Valeri
Ah, I must admit that I didn’t look at rack sizes.
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.
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 wrote:
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
If any one is interested, I have a brand new AS400 sitting upstairs in my computer room, it was a bought as surplus item, never used. I just hung onto it. It can be yours cheap, not wanting an arm and a leg for it, I would be open to a nice offer if anyone has an interest.
Thanks for that. Those were the kinds of prices I was vaguely remembering. Not totally out of whack compared to high end name-brand x86-64 servers (i.e. higher prices but not unimaginably so for the extra power — pun intended).
39 thoughts on - IBM Buying RedHat
Also announced on IBM’s website:
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2018-10-28-IBM-To-Acquire-Red-Hat-Completely-Changing-The-Cloud-Landscape-And-Becoming-Worlds-1-Hybrid-Cloud-Provider
Damn, this is bad enough to make one weep.
The fact that IBM is buying RH isn’t make me weep as much as this statement —
“The open source, enterprise software maker will become a unit of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud division, with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management team and reporting to CEO Ginni Rometty.”
Will the end-user market in all facets (desktop Linux?) continue to be supported?
—
——————————————
MzK
“Less is MORE.”
Le 28/10/2018 à 22:10, Albert McCann a écrit :
Red Hat would stay as a distinct entity inside IBM. IBM has also contributed to Free software, and especially Linux kernel. I don’t know how bad it is and the implications for CentOS…
Alain
—
Administrateur Système/Réseau C2N (ex LPN) Centre de Nanosciences et Nanotechnologies (UMR 9001)
Avenue de La vauve, 91920 Palaiseau Tel : 01-70-27-06-88
IBM screwed up with the purchase of the Weather.com properties, including Weather Underground. For more than a decade, WU benefitted from thousands of people with personal weather stations feeding local data to WU. IBM now plans to kill the existing WU weather API (which also was the Weather.com API), and gives the appearance of screwing over all those personal weather folks. While IBM now claims that they will have minimal ‘free’ access ‘to their own data’, a huge number of the PW folks have bailed and left, as IBM won’t even tell them if they can even have the three-day forecast, let alone the ten-day forecast, plus the weather alerts data.
The WU API will die 12-31-18, and still there is no announcement as to what and how the PW people will be allowed to access the API. this leaves a bunch of downstream users who had free API keys, which WU gave out to nonprofit users up until last April or so. It also screws over the paid API users, and looks like the costs for commercial API access will drastically increase.
The IBM rep on the message forum still claims that IBM will support the PW data providers, but will not answer what exactly that will provide to those PW providers.
As they’ve completely screwed over users providing free data, I can see them attempting to do the same to the ‘free software’ company where they plan to monetize the software and data the same way as the weather data.
Read all the comments here from the PW providers:
https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/end-of-service-for-the-weather-underground-api
Al
That old war wound started aching again.
IBM:Redhat :: Oracle:Sun
Cheers, Zube
At least IBM is a far more attractive buyer than the evil Oracle, well known for killing OSS companies as a strategy. Also Microsoft has ben mentioned as possible buyer of Red Hat, that would be much worse too.
So, let’s not be too pessimistic and give IBM a fair chance. IBM
certainly does not have a bad track record on open source and as a technology-driven company, at least a much better track record than most if not all other potential buyers.
Of course. For the next several $timeframes, it will all be speculation, not worth a shovelful of earth.
I’d be happy, nay, over-the-freakin’-moon, to be proven wrong.
If the trajectory follows the Oracle ™ pattern, the first change will be that things that you used to be able to download unencumbered will need an IBM username and password. Everyone who is nervous will try to reassure themselves and others that this isn’t a fundamental change, that it’s really just a minor inconvenience, we can still get what we need. I think our English chums call this “the thin end of the wedge.”
I’ll stop now and wait with everyone else, silently, to see what happens. But I can’t resist an old joke from long ago when there was a rumor about IBM buying Apple (I think this was in the late 80s or 90s):
Q: What do you get when you cross IBM with Apple?
A: IBM
Cheers, Zube
Actually, it could have been *much8 worse: *Oracle* could have bought RH.
That *really* would have been an order of magnitude worse.
mark
Not for Canonical…
I like the fact that it was IBM who bought RedHat. I remember several good things about IBM:
1. Postfix. Vietse Venema wrote it at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and IBM was really happy to release MTA written with security in mind under IBM Public License 1.0 which is a free software license – for everybody to use.
2. Does anybody still remember OS/2 which lost userbase to MS Windows for workgroups, but IBM still supported it for quite long period of time. And OS/2 was much better IMHO.
I bet many people can add other great things about IBM.
All in all I’m not unhappy IBM bough RedHat, but will be quite unhappy if IBM sells RedHat to somebody else after some time.
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That’s one example but I think there is much more in the history of IBM
when looking back.
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)!
Regards, Simon
As a long-time OS/2 user, I do remember, and damn what a miserable life that was. As soon as I had wound my BBS down (which was running on Maximus on OS/2), I had switched my home server around to Linux since I preferred it way way more. Using any new hardware, or a decent graphics card was a constant struggle and IBM wouldn’t care much.
Support as in life support is as good as none.
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.
Also, looking at TOP500 list there are not so many POWER systems anymore. IBM could change this now.
Regards, Simon
Yeah…..I guess that’s one way to look at it.
My biggest worry? Is I’ve placed so much time and effort “getting to know” Fedora and its intricacies, idiosyncrasies, its ins and outs…dealt with ridicule on this very same list when I first started, have “cut my teeth” on learning VERY hard lessons about certain syntax in the Terminal and what NOT to type…….only to have that all “taken”
away from me at the whim of IBM. It just seems unfair. I’m hoping like H3LL that the developers @ Fedora are seriously thinking about forking
“Just In Case”!? I mean they could still use the .RPM extensions, and possibly even still pull their code from RHEL, but at least they would be autonomous and wouldn’t have to rely on IBM’s good will in order to keep on churning out what….to me…is the best Linux distro on the planet! As I write this….I’m eyeballing the spare ThinkPad T-410 that I’ve neglected since I have Fedora running on a Dell XPS, and I’m thinking its time to get “back to my roots” and to find a distro I can put on that device and run without concern….I’ve heard some decent things about this “Pop-OS” which comes with System76’s hardware. Maybe I’ll give that a spin……then like I had said before…there’s always Debian plain vanilla…with maybe MATE or Cinnamon?…..or else its going to have to be where I buckle down and finally learn all there is to know about LFS and Arch Linux and then move on to one of those…(God!…..at 47!?….its like how can I POSSIBLY start over again!?…) and THIS is the kind of turmoil that ensues when a corporation buys a fully functioning open course company!
EGO II
version 8 coming up? – must be due soon …. Love learning new stuff, it never gets old (pun intended). sorry for the noise, but couldn’t resist, must be the age ….
Hahahaah!…..good one! Now THAT made me smile!…..thanks for the laugh! Gotta remember to not always be the Doom & Gloom bearer! :o)!
Guess I’ll just keep on truckin’ with F29…and hope all goes well.
EGO II
Am 2018-10-30 08:06, schrieb Eddie G. O’Connor Jr.:
I think you seriously underestimate the amount of influence and sheer man-power RedHat brings to Linux – and IBM, too.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kernel-report-highlights-developers-roles-accelerating-pace-change/
There’s a reason RHEL is an enterprise-distribution – and Debian et.al. aren’t (and never will, outside their niches).
RedHat writes ton of code that is needed for Linux to be truly
“Enterprise” and that exists nowhere else. The above statistics is only the kernel – but Enterprise Linux is so much more than a kernel. That code isn’t going to write itself, nor is somebody else going to pick up unless someone will pay the bill. Maybe somebody can fork all the code and maintain it for a while – but to stay relevant, there must be further development, a roadmap …
Sure, there’s Google and a couple of other companies – but they really only write for themselves and as much as people try cargo-culting them, most companies aren’t Google and their use-case hardly matches anyone else’s.
I still remember when SAP announced that their engineers had ported their ERP to Linux – a sparetime-project at the beginning – and they were making it a tier 1 platform. That was over 20 years ago.
Linux has come a long way.
But it is also entirely possible that CentOS 8 will be the last one to come out. Before a corporate agenda will “merge” it with their general philosophy.
To me it looks pathetic that a lively profitable entity with an entirely different corporate psychology is consumed by big conglomerates. What for?
By the way I am 60 and been following Linux/Linus since Kernel 0.99. Some time before RedHat appeared strong on the scene.
Andreas
True. It has, but still as another poster stated?
“/_But it is also entirely possible that CentOS 8 will be the last one to come out. Before a corporate agenda will “merge” it with their general philosophy. _//_
_//__//_
_//_To me it looks pathetic that a lively profitable entity with an entirely different corporate psychology is consumed by big conglomerates. What for? _//_
_//__//_
_//_By the way I am 60 and been following Linux/Linus since Kernel 0.99. Some time before RedHat appeared strong on the scene.”_//_
_//__//_
_//_Andreas – 10.2018 _/
It might not be a “PROBABLE” scenario…but its is a POSSIBLE one! What would that entail? Just because Red Hat is a strong contributor to the code now….if “Big Daddy” says to pull the plug….who’s to refuse them?…they OWN Red Hat now! And this was my concern, at least as its own entity, RHEL had the luxury of whom to do business with and whom to reject / turn down. Now? They will be “goaded”? into playing with whomever the headmaster SAYS they’re to play with! I dunno….maybe I’m thinking about it too much but it just doesn’t bode well when a company gets bought out with nary a resistance. I guess only time will tell.
EGO Ii
Am 2018-10-30 10:03, schrieb Eddie G. O’Connor Jr.:
Even more profit. Also, borrowing money is still very cheap these days (AFAIK, Amazon has financed most of their expansion – this is only possible because of continuously low interest rates) and companies want to take advantage of that, while low interest rates lasts.
Yes, possible.
As of currently, RedHat isn’t really replaceable.
IBM might sack half of the RHAT devs but that doesn’t mean they could continue to write their code at some other place. That other place would have to pay them, too, and it’s unlikely to be for the same thing as before.
You can clearly see that in the OpenSolaris forks: a lot of people were let go, but none of the forks really took off. The people went elsewhere.
IBM knows all this. There’s likely going to be MSFT-licensing squeeze going to happen in the (somewhat distant) future. And a push to cloud (and OpenShift).
From what I hear, almost all software-vendors are increasing licensing costs next year. Not only MSFT. Everybody that thinks they can get away with raising prices is doing so right now.
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.
IBM’s Power8 and Power9 servers run 8 threads per core, so a 24 core Power 8 server runs 192 threads, as long as the operating system can handle it, you should be fine.
And if you’re looking for major operations running on Power, look no farther than Google…they’re a huge part of the Power consortium and run a huge farm of Power systems on Tyan boards.
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 :-)
If they came back now with something like their deprecated X86 servers
(Netfinity, System x) but on POWER, that could be interesting.
Regards, Simon
Simon Matter wrote:
Um, yep. The AS/400/system 1/whatever is not a small system. It’s what used to be called a mid-frame, not a micro. It’s money.
Back around ’94, I worked at a small software house that had it’s own DOS/VSR/SP mini-mainrame: Looked like a *very* large tower case… and cost $192k. I wouldn’t expect a system 1, if that’s the current name, to be under $100k or $200k, minimum.
mark
Well, Google is in a different situation. They can even request their own modified motherboards and customize so they get exactly what they want. We can not do that in the SME market.
What was looking very interesting was this Raptor server:
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV1/intro.html
However, the bigger POWER9 CPUs were not available at the time we were looking at it – this has changed now.
Still I wasn’t sure how to compare the real life speed of POWER9 compared to something like the AMD EPYC 7601. And then, will everything work smooth on POWER the same way it does on the AMD? POWER seems still not a first preference arch for CentOS, so how would it impact us? Is it smart to add another CPU arch if we still have to run some X86 code, like in our case SAP MaxDB (which is also available for AIX on POWER but not Linux on POWER)?
In the end we decided for AMD EPYC but kept the POWER thing in mind. Now that IBM announces the purchase of RedHat it just reminded me that this could become interesting again in the future. Let’s see how it goes.
Regards, Simon
Am 2018-10-30 15:53, schrieb Simon Matter:
It probably depends on the workload.
AFAIK, there were a lot of microcode-updates from AMD to fix bugs in the first batches of Threadripper and Epyc.
It was not smooth sailing from the very beginning.
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.
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.
AS/400 -> eServer iSeries -> System i -> Power Systems RS/6000 -> eServer pSeries -> System p -> Power Systems
So the current ‘Power Systems’ range combines what was AS/400 with what was RS/6000. They all use Power CPUs now and run Linux, IBM i, or AIX.
“IBM i” is, of course the operating system previously known as OS/400
and then i5/OS.
Simple, eh. ;-)
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.
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
Yup, it must cost them a pretty penny to maintain all those proprietary operating systems (especially when you include their mainframe ones). I
suspect that Linux will eventually replace i and AIX — eventually. But I bet there are some significant clients who are still willing to pay money to keep them going.
I would add “and FreeBSD” here. Mentioning only one of BSD descendants, the one with largest userbase.
Valeri
Ah, I must admit that I didn’t look at rack sizes.
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.
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 wrote:
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
If any one is interested, I have a brand new AS400 sitting upstairs in my computer room, it was a bought as surplus item, never used. I just hung onto it. It can be yours cheap, not wanting an arm and a leg for it, I would be open to a nice offer if anyone has an interest.
john plemons
Please contact me off list….
Many thanks,
Richard
Richard Zimmerman River Bend Hose Specialty, Inc.
—–Original Message—
Found something:
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/02/15/ins-outs-ibms-power9-zz-systems/
That’s the entry-level, I presume?
Thanks for that. Those were the kinds of prices I was vaguely remembering. Not totally out of whack compared to high end name-brand x86-64 servers (i.e. higher prices but not unimaginably so for the extra power — pun intended).
—
Mark Rousell