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IBM Hardware IT

IBM To Update Unix Servers 22

Posted by Hemos from the power-the-machine dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IBM is about to announce a major update its pSeries Unix servers, according to a story on IT Week's site. The story quotes an IBM source, who said the new servers will use IBM's Power5+ chip."
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IBM To Update Unix Servers More

IBM To Update Unix Servers

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  • IBM Out in Front Further? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Monday February 06, 2006 @12:05PM (#14651044) Journal
    I don't work with Unix servers, but I've always heard that entry servers using the Power4 processors were the best. From The Unix Guardian [itjungle.com]:
    As I said when I went over the high-end and the entry Unix server markets earlier this year, without any doubt, IBM has been an increasingly dominant factor in the Unix server business, across all form factors and SMP scalability, since the Power4 processors debuted four years ago. IBM is, in fact, arguably the main reason that the Unix server business has seen any growth at all.
    Now, as the table with that article [itjungle.com] shows, the 2005 pSeries kills the competition in their workload tests. I'm curious though about other server solutions (large or small scale) that Slashdot users may work with or know about. What about Unisys or Hewlett Packard scalable multiprocessor (SMP) solutions? Has anyone used Unix on these? Is it not recommended because of the chipsets or the way the processors are built [phys.uu.nl]?
    • Having worked with Power5 systems since they came out, I can attest to the system. The last part that IBM has missing, which I was informed they were working on, is hot-swap cpu. I know Sun has had this for a while.

      IBM has positioned themselves very well by making sure that linux runs on both the pSeries hardware AND the zSeries in addition to the xSeries (Intel line). There is an offical support policy for linux on Power.

      I know Sun just added that to the Sparc line but I'm not sure where HP stands. Is Linu
      • SUN X86 systems (AMD chips) Offically support Linux (RHEL, SUSE) and Solaris, AND Windows. The new SPARC IV+ chips are a bit slower than the Power5+ but not much. With Solaris 10 they come out about even versus P5+ and AIX as Solaris 10 has some very good optimizations. The new T1 CMT processor is something no one else has. Also, with Sun you get very very good hardware without having to open your doors to IBM Global Services who will hound you for all sorts of business for the rest of your life. IBM gets 6
        • I'm curious about the SparcIV+ benchmarks. IBM claims that Sun only does well when comparing a (dual-core) IV+ against a single core Power5 (or 5+). Any thoughts on this?
          • The devil is in the details right? Have you ever seen what qualifies as a TPC benchmark. If I'm not mistaken, the tests are all selects at which point and enough memory and your database has everything cached in bufferpools.

            As to the specifics of the T1 and P5, I think I'll do some digging. In the end you're comparing more than just the machine. The OS comes into play as well. I think a fairer benchmark would be Linux on Power and Linux on Sparc running a non-vendor specific package. For instance in the DB2
          • Excellent point! Depends on what the meaning of the word "core" is, to paraphrase a former president.

            IBM's Power4 came out years ago as "dual core" on the same chip. Little fan fare. The cores share L3 cache (now they're all doing that too), but little else, and you really got 2X+ performance from their multi-core implementation.

            I believe Sun implemented (questionable word here) dual core in enough of a different way so that you really get less than 2X performance over a comparable speed single core chip. I
            • Sun US IV+ CPUs are multi-core so you get about 1.7-2.0X (depending) on the application,BEA is correct. You still only have X/2 CPUs. Take the T1 for instance, it's only 8 cores but each core can run 4 threads, it's only 8 CPUs or is it 32? Also the Power5+ chip isn't available except in selected IBM servers (high end), the US IV+ is available from the low side of the mid-range(V440) up to the massive E25K. IBM's Power Series is multi-core as well,but IBM won't call them "cores" they call it "symetric mul
        • From http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6034085.html [zdnet.com]

          McNealy said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison recently gave Sun a big shot in the arm by lowering the license fee that the database company charges for Sun servers.

          "I sat down with Larry and said, 'Larry, you're killing us,'" McNealy said. "Part of the problem is we didn't have the fastest microprocessors, so you had to throw a lot of microprocessors at it. When you charge $30,000 per core, we ended up looking very expensive."

  • IBM Page Already Updated? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bad to the Ben ( 871357 ) on Monday February 06, 2006 @12:19PM (#14651164)
    IBM Page on p5 Systems. [ibm.com] Seems that the page is already up with the new info. Note the stats regarding the Power 5 chips:
    POWER5 systems running Linux have beaten the best-of-breed performers in SPECweb99 by 27%, SPECsfs by 158%, and NetBench® by 55% proving the power of Linux on POWER systems. Best of all, a 4-way System p5 550 running DB2® has established leadership TPC-C benchmarks versus other Linux platforms.

    I'd like more info about the "best of the breed" part. If you click on the Performance heading on the above page you can find a PDF to read about the tests, but as in a lot of these cases it's pretty cryptic. I'd love to see a comparison between the newest Opterons and Power 5.

    It's nice to have a solid competitor to x86 though, especially seems how SPARC seems to be losing momentum with Sun using AMD in it's new X series.
    • I'm a little miffed at IBM r.e. opterons. I've been trying to buy opterons from them for a while but they only have one server model that uses Opterons.

      When your datacenter says they won't let you buy any space because of cooling issues, Opterons start looking a little better.
      • Give Sun a call. Last time I looked they had like 5 systems using Opeterons, single core, dual core and single/dual CPU. Very good prices as well.
      • Call Sun. They're pushing some extremely nice Opteron-based kit right now. Also, if cooling/power issues are a primary concern, the new T1000/T2000 servers may astonish you. (Note, however, that these chips are very workload-dependent; If you're doing heavy FP work, then this is NOT the system for you. Conversely, if you're serving up web pages, this might make people gasp at the performance/BTU)

        HP is apparently selling nice Opterons, but they have very clearly stated that they'll never support HP-UX on the
        • We're kind of in a stick right now. We're just now coming out of the phase where we wanted to buy only IBM for a while. The biggest reason was a new project with high visibility. We wanted no questions of support so we bought IBM boxen, IBM branded FC switches and hosted it in an IBM datacenter running IBM Websphere Application Server.

          Now that we're moving to Tomcat, the IBM issue is not as important. Of course now they want to run all the appservers on redundant VMware servers connected to our IBM SAN so w
          • Hrm, you might want to look at Solaris 10 zones rather than VMware; might end up cheaper as you won't need the extra software. Added to that, you lose the issues regarding cross-vendor support that can arise. The T1000s are also good for cramming lots of threads in a small footprint.

            Caveat Emptor: I've never used VMWare servers, so I don't know how good or bad they are. I've only used zones in the Solaris 10 course I did, so don't have a lot of real-world experience of them so far. Both solutions will

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