70% decrease on memory price

That puts them on par with Sun and a bit cheaper than HP, but still twice as expensive as the no-name boxes like Dell.

If you can't beat them join them

We were a koolaide Solaris shop and about two years ago went true blue.

Power performance and PowerVM gave us the ability to replace 250 servers with only four Power6 systems. We saved enough with our Oracle maintenance and avoiding new licenses the p570's we bought were essentially free.

We used to drink koolaide to stay up at night for our midnight planned outages, now with partition mobility we sleep.

The Oracle/Sun drama is interesting, but we have never been happier. We have shifted our resources from 70% on maintaining old systems to 70% deploying new solutions.

This is a great story because the power cores and PowerVM is so powerful we are now at 24GB per core. The down side of incredible core performance and great virtualization technology is you need more memory to house the hundreds of virtual systems. It's certainly better than have 300 systems with dedicated resources.

Cheers from the UK!

Got a phone call to make:

"Le plein, s´il vous plait"

You can never have too much memory.

Ah

Right - now the true allegiances come out. No negative asides or snide comments....

Watch it Hacktard, your agenda is showing!

@AC 21st November 2009 04:41 GMT

What the hell were you thinking? Running hundreds of virtual machines in a *NIX environment - You may remember that the whole point of *NIX is that it scales out without having to run each application in a VM, and that you can isolate each user from everyone else...

Perhaps you come from a Windows (shudder) background. You got the replacing 250 servers with 4 servers bit right, but really! 100's of VMs, with their associated overhead - Perhaps you should have saved a bit of your money for some independent (not IBM) advice. AIX may not be everyone's favourite *NIX, but it generally just works.

"We used to drink koolaide to stay up at night for our midnight planned outages, now with partition mobility we sleep." I note, with interest, that your post was timed at 04:41 GMT - It was not modded until 11 hours later?

Needle in the haystack

So IBM has to find the ONLY ONE switcher out there here at "El Reg".

LOL!

BTW: We have just placed a huge order of new Sun SPARC (!) Systems. Maybe someone wants to write a story about that :-)

@Anonymous Coward - Saturday 21st November 2009 04:41 GMT

Don't get too giddy - for every 'koolaid tale' like that I can send you a tale of just how much pain and suffering IBM POWER kit (the name presumably relates to the two companies coining it in?) and AIX (aches?) causes me and my colleagues in our daily worklife and just how much pain its causing out of work.

We've nearly all got partners threatening divorce due to power/aix dumping core whenever the whim takes it.

@Tim99

There's not necessarily any virtualization overhead in Unix, at least not with Solaris containers/zones. It can be quite useful, especially if you sell capacity to different customers. Not so nice to run them all in the same OS instance...

@Thommy M

Er, the original AC moved FROM Solaris TO IBM PowerVM, but I agree that using Solaris containers/zones has a RELATIVELY small overhead.

Timing?

Of course, the fact that DDR3-quipped Tukzilla is just due early next year had nothing to do with IBM's decision to drop prices on the DDR2-equipped Power6+.....

And, yes, you never can have too much memory! Until you need to boot with a full memory check on, at which point you really start to hate those large memory systems.

tukwila early next year?

Last I heard from Lorraine Bartlett was Intel will announce it in April and systems will not be available for three months later which makes second half of 2010 at the earliest. I am so disappointed nu Intel...they sucked in HP then starved Itanium. Given their current Xeon success I wonder if they is really just Windows/OS2 just on the hardware front and HP is the one who got burned. How Intel gets a pass on this debacle I will never understand.

This is deja vu all over again,

Ingomar

70% Discount ????

is there not a legal way to make this US companies to adhere to some price regulations ? this leads to lot of un-ethical pricing and leads to corruption . i.e it is easy for IBM or anything with this kind of price model to make a unsuspecting customer beleive they are getting best deal when they are offered even 20-30% discount, without knowing this companies can even offer 99% discount if pressed .