I had the pleasure earlier this month of attending a demo day at HP's Cupertino campus to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Superdome server, see what's new in the high-end server market and learn about what's going on with HP-UX.
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Member since:2005-07-06
With IBM, you can run any mix of Linux, AIX, and i OS. Linux on POWER is second only to x86, AIX is pretty close to HP-UX but probably better for DB2 and Oracle, while i OS has a large presence in companies that have been around awhile.
POWER7 will be lethal. It will be interesting to see if Oracle/Sun can keep up. Intel seems to not really care about Itanium.
I'm actually surprised that Itanium is still being developed given how far the x86-64 has come - personally, I'd love to see HP port OpenVMS to x86-64 and sell workstations and servers pre-loaded with OpenVMS on it
x86-64 with some effort on chipset design can be just as reliable as Itanium but without the massive cost involved and prohibitively high development costs. Oh well, its only a dream
Member since:2005-07-22
That will be the day Hell Freezes over then?
Seriously, if HP could kill VMS tomorrow then they would. But too many businesses use it. They find it sits there day in, day out and runs and runs and runs.
Last year, I decomissioned a VAX Cluster that had a cluster uptime of 17.6 years.
If by some chance HP were to have a sudden attack of Common Sense then the first complaints would be
Select 1 from below
Where's my MS Messenger?
Where's MS Word
Where's Photoshop
Sort of just like what people say about Linux
Member since:2008-10-23
You're kidding, right? Do you realise Sun is now king of TPC-C nenchmark? And also comes better with price/performance ratio.
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
Also the Exadata V2 database machine is something that will IBM see hard to match.
I don't think people really care about overpriced IBM gear anymore.
Member since:2005-07-06
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
Also the Exadata V2 database machine is something that will IBM see hard to match.
I don't think people really care about overpriced IBM gear anymore.
What I find funny is Microsoft isn't to be found on that list - what happened?
The only people who care about IBM are those who purchase Microsoft products and think they perform peachy in the enterprise; you know the sort, when they ring up and want a mail server - they'll ask for an Exchange server - asking for products by brand because that is all they know, the brand.
Oracle has improved though, I remember 3 years ago it was a horrible piece of crap that made any Sun hardware appear like it was a slug; Sybase had no problems pumping out the numbers on Solaris on both SPARC and x86-64 machines.
Edited 2009-10-30 09:13 UTC
Member since:2007-06-01
Do you actually know the price of exadata? Do you really know what you are getting, when you buy Exadata? Or are you just trolling?
I know what you get when you buy exadata. You buy a bunch off x86 servers with SATA drives for a LOT of money, and you are stuck with that peace of gear, that can't run anything else then Oracle SW. And trust me Oracle RAC ain't cheap and Oracle RAC ain't what they advertise it to be. And you tell me IBM HW is overpriced?! On which you can get support for Linux/AIX...and you actually have a choice what to use, and no one is forcing you to use AIX?!
EDIT: dvzt, are you a manager or somthing? You sound like one, they love the marketing slides and the fancy charts. And most of the times they don't have a clue on the matter at hand.
Edited 2009-10-30 11:09 UTC
Member since:2007-02-22
I have seen the new TCP score from Oracle. Congratulations to them for topping the chart.
One funky thing though - that is the only cluster solution you see in the list. You can't even get Oracle people to recommend using RAC over a big multi-CPU machine so long as someone pays for the hw. Administration and support is a day and night difference. No admin wants to run RAC if they can avoid.
And have you looked at the percentage licenses are of the total cost? No wonder they want to sell you that setup.
You might also guess that there might be updates possible to the IBM setup.
Which is all so-so interesting of course.
What IBM _is_ doing is more interesting. Power7 will come some time next year and will probably come in a 256-way p595. You can take a guess at the performance that will have (Cost? Yes. Lots of it I expect.)
They also have their own cluster solution with DB2 PureScale. I expect you can chain p595s into that cluster till the cows come home. There will be very interesting times ahead indeed, and I'm not at all certain Oracle will be able to scale up if they want to stay in the numbers game.
Personal opinion: 7.7m was by far not enough to make an impact. IBM has publicly talked about their Power7 and I think that will have the "PS2 effect" in the market; that it will stop many that might be seriously interest in the Sun RAC setup to wait-and-see (if they have the time) and compare it to a similar Power7 setup.
(For the record: I both use and like AIX.)
Member since:2006-07-11
How has Itanium not paid dividends? It hasn't taken over the world like it was hoped, but it is ubiquitous across it's Enterprise server line, and it runs Windows, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Non-Stop, the latter two of which are used in high-profit sales for mission-critical apps.
Especially the new Tukwila-class chips should be sweet.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2006-11-30
I think IBM pretty much cleans shop at megaservers with the ultra speedy POWER6+ p 595. Itanium has yet to pay any dividends for HP. The only reason I'd consider the HP option would be if we had legacy HP-UX apps.
With IBM, you can run any mix of Linux, AIX, and i OS. Linux on POWER is second only to x86, AIX is pretty close to HP-UX but probably better for DB2 and Oracle, while i OS has a large presence in companies that have been around awhile.
POWER7 will be lethal. It will be interesting to see if Oracle/Sun can keep up. Intel seems to not really care about Itanium.