From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM.
We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes.
The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details.
Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it.
It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.
Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.
But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.
[edit]We bought our new iSeries (Power9-based) through a VAR this year with an IBM rep helping us with what we actually needed. It was a bit of a drawn-out experience, but overall, I wasn't displeased. It was easier than dealing with some PC vendors (looking at you Dell and HP). I would imagine it will be another 15 years before we have to buy another one.[/edit]
When I worked at IBM, I usually called in a favor from friends at a local VAR whenever I needed to order something to get a BoM, because even internally the process was opaque.
The first one was the latest server that could run Series i. No big deal, we were coming to the end of our maintenance contract and would probably be buying a new machine in the next year or so.
The second one was a 2U, 48-socket POWER server. They bragged about it running thousands of Linux VM's at a time. I found it a bit odd because nobody who would be running this particular ERP software would be running thousands of Linux VM's.
I've spent some time looking to see if it would be possible to spin up a POWER based VM in the cloud (just out of curiosity really). While it seems possible in theory in the IBM Cloud, it seems IBM themselves is only interested in offering this to their enterprise customers moving to the cloud, focusing it on getting people to move IBM's AIX/iSeries lock-in to the cloud. When looking at it before, I was not able to spin up a POWER VM from a regular IBM Cloud account at least.
There might be a bit more interest in POWER if it wasn't so damn inaccessible but it really is. If the easiest way to get into POWER is paying thousands of dollars to a company retrofitting IBM's decidedly non-desktop hardware into desktop hardware (talking about Raptor CS), your architecture is doomed to wait for all your enterprise customers to move to amd64 commodity hardware. Maybe that is IBM's goal even, I don't know.
Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own.
It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.
If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.
I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started.
The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in.
My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.
They care about the quarterly report and right now the best way to improve short-term performance is to milk your existing locked-in customers for as much money as possible.
Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.
https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/
Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.
That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect.
If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.
They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well.
And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.
I know some of the IBM story from very close and it takes a certain attitude to even want to work there.
If IBM had even just kept pace and stayed behind AWS with Softlayer after they acquired them, they would have a healthy cloud business by now. It might be because I maintained a system on Softlayer both pre and post acquisition - so I was really close and able to see what was happening - but they squandered a huge opportunity there.
edit: oh hey, you're ahead of me :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185759
Well besides the fact that 1) IBM is the only party with both the capabilities and interest in making high performance Power based products [1], and 2) evidently does not understand how to (or why to) invest in bringing this to a general audience. I don't really care if they would do this in IBM Cloud or with other cloud infrastructure companies, but they don't seem to be doing either. In addition 3) why would other parties be interested in running Power when they can run amd64 or arm? It certainly doesn't look to have a price advantage...
IBM really needs to shepherd Power well - they're the only ones that can do it. But I can't help but thinking they seem to be leading it to the grave despite apparently very capable engineering.
[1]: And why would anyone but IBM go for Power at this point if they can have ARM too? An open license matters very little when compared to ARM's mindshare and momentum.
Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else.
If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.
OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.
yup -- not turn key at all -- "contact sales" but it exists: https://cloud.google.com/ibm
When your are already invested it is far safer to stay with what works for you. My downtime is measured in hours per year and all of it has been scheduled across the last seven years; that was the last time we had an unscheduled outage. You can achieve this will all types of hardware; well maybe not all types; but it is easier with some than compared to others and expectations are certainly much higher.
We joke at work that we get forgotten all the time because our daily ready for business meetings; all groups reporting in; never see us mentioned except to state plans for upcoming quarterly maintenance. A pleasant state to be in
This is probably a bit picky since you don't mention what those machines do, but that's not even "four nines" in the high-availability scale. I'm not sure that's something to boast about for a Fortune 500 company or any kind of praise for the IBM series. Maybe you meant hours over the last seven years?
If the "hours per year" is true, they're actually achieving 100% uptime.
Fucking big deal, if you ask me.
In the end, it was great but not magical, so the difficulty of acquiring offsets the benefits IMO.
Why making it so difficult to navigate? Just give resources an price.
I have to invest so much effort into an infrastructure I don't even know If I'd like to have.
https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/
There are also these https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
You can also run under qemu, but I don't know how solid that is, and there is at least one simulator.
(Disclaimer: I work for SUSE.)
You might also not need the Radeon WX7100 Pro, if a consumer level graphic card is enough there are sevaral options: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility...
The more you’re ready to do-it-yourself, the more you can save. You absolutely need the motherboard and IBM chip, and then you can get other things like memory, storage, graphic card, etc. used for much cheaper. Only the memory is a bit special as it has to be registered, but because of that you might be able to find good deals since it can’t be used in standard desktop computers.
You can get more performance for the same price with AMD/Intel, but for those interested this platform is not that out of reach. I use it as my workstation and I’m happy with it.
Not unreasonable. $500 for the 4-core processor or $800 for the 8 core. Basically what you would have paid for a decent system decades ago, without adjusting for inflation.
That’s 8 cores, which since Power9 has SMT4 means 32 threads. The 4 core CPU bundle is a bit cheaper but when you add the 2u CPU cooler its price gets very close, so it’s not worth it unless your computer case is too narrow for the 3u (≃15 cm clearance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_unit) cooler included with the 8 core CPU.
It won’t run AmigaOS unless on an emulator[1], and then you’re better off with AMD/Intel: you would lose more performance in emulating the CPU, but you would get more raw performance for your money anyway.
[1] https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,75.0.html
If you want to run AmigaOS software natively on PowerPC your best option is a PPC Mac running MorphOS. It even runs on the PowerBook G4: https://ddg.co/?q=morphos+powerbook+g4
Or if a well-integrated emulator suits you better, take a look at AmiKit: https://www.amikit.amiga.sk/
I don’t think that this CPU would be a net advantage for those use cases. I did use Amiga computers even as Commodore went bust, hanging on, but the approach I’m going for now is FPGA implementations: https://misterfpga.org/ http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=preorder
I’m in the waiting list for Vampire4 Standalone, but for now I’ve got a MiSTeR.
So no, don’t buy a Power9 hoping to run AmigaOS on it any better than on a mainstream PC.
P.S.: the $1310.99 price mentioned by aww_dang must be from a few months ago, the current price displayed in Raptor’s website is $1732.07. Prices went up due to the current COVID-19-induced crisis, which also made Raptor cancel their upcoming Condor platform (ATX Power9 but LaGrange-based: twice the memory bandwidth): https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html
P.S.#2: for those in Europe, Vikings (https://vikings.net/) has been trying for a while to offer them here and they might be able do so it soon: https://www.talospace.com/2020/08/vikings-upcoming-openpower...
P.S.#3: used BlackBird with 8C Power9 for sale in Germany: https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,153.0.html
Not for a while: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026
To give you an idea, I can log in into a local vendor's website, for example, https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 and quickly get an idea of what an SR650 Lenovo rack server would cost me. My configurations would obviously change the cost, which is where I talk to the vendor to get the real costs.
I'm not saying talking to sales people is necessarily a pleasant and easy task, of course, especially as you typically need to know more about it than they do.
We ended up using ActiveMQ, and literally that evening I had things talking to each other. No contracts, no hassle, just downloaded and got to work.
A bit more on-topic in regards to IBM though- we buy licenses from them directly, and the past few months they have sent kind of bizarre emails saying I could save money if I bought them through a third party partner. I just forwarded the mail to the finance guys, but I can't imagine why IBM would introduce a middle man into our relationship with them and how that additional layer in between could end up saving us money.
Wow, I didn't realize their culture had changed that much. They were a sales oriented company since the days of Thomas Watson Sr.
[1] Yes I know IBM used to sell everything down to the pens and pencils, but virtually always to support some very expensive other purchase. [2] Yes I know IBM has things called "SMB sales" or some variation. From my experience at IBM, they were either targeting some specific product/market combo, or they were a bad joke; not exactly the A-team. YMMV.
The systems are still quite expensive, but likely within the budget of a University research lab.
I've recently tried to engage with EventMobi, a company that supports virtual events.
I'm ready to spend thousands if necessary.
However:
#1: There is no way to just sign up, which is off-putting.
#2: Requesting a demo just put me in their funnel with canned email messages. And after over a week, I have yet to be contacted by a live human, despite sending emails.
I feel companies leave a lot of money on the table by not having some sort of self-driven onboarding.
Sales reps are humans. They get busy. Forget to call back, etc.
I feel like there should ALWAYS be at least some sort of self-driven flow at the low end. Even if sales are required at the high-end.
Otherwise, it seems, money is always being left on the table.
I would happily experiment with one of these at our HPC cluster(a small group at an University), but the idea of talking to a sales rep to even figure out what it would cost puts me off completely, ignoring the licenses for most interesting things to do with the hardware you buy.
I wish t. power boxes were as easy to buy as x86 boxes. Simply configure, get an idea of a price, talk to the distributor and place an order.