back to article Details spill on IBM's big iron Power7 servers

With Big Blue getting ready to launch its biggest Power7-based server, the 256-core Power 795 machine, on August 17 and four entry Power7 machines as well, resellers have been briefed and tongues have started wagging. The Power 795 is a 256-core, 1,024-thread behemoth that will, as El Reg suggested, sport 8TB of main memory …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    At least you get what you pay for

    I hate low TCA boxes that can sneak under the purchasing departments approval process. We get thrown boxes that some department bought and thought x86 was "commodity" low price...etc.

    They they get the bill for Oracle/WebSphere/Tivoli/DR/power/cooling/rackspace and they realized their cheap box is 10X more expensive than the virtual machines on the power boxes the smart departments use.

    We have standardized on Power system for everything we can do and VMWare "someday Xen" for the windows, Linux not on Power stuff.

    Interesting to see IBM adding more low end boxes. We prefer the high-end and have blades for the stand alone workloads which don't take advantage of hypersockets.

    As for the SPARC gear we used to use, the guy who championed IBM Power is the star around the shop as we never went to SPARC64 which we hear is going the same way as UltraSPARC V. I would hate to writing "Oracle Solaris Engineer" on my resume

    The Oracle sales rep who raised our prices 18% last year came by requesting a Sun box inventory for the new maintenance contracts which require all boxes to be on maint and we showed him the door and took his badge away. He now has to be escorted in the building.

    Cheers from CA

    Indiana

  2. Kebabbert

    A.C

    Or you just buy a couple of cheap 8-way Nehalem-EX machines with 1TB RAM (2TB RAM with new RAM sticks). Then you can also virtualize your Windows servers.

    But I am glad that Oracle does not say: "Our X4800 can virtualize four hundred POWER servers" and when you really look into the details it turns out that is POWER4 servers and they all idle. That would be very doubful to say? But IBM does says so. Boast that POWER7 servers can virtualize several hundred servers, but in reality, all servers are antique and they all idle. Anyone can virtualize several hundred old, idling servers. False marketing.

    1. Jesper Frimann
      Big Brother

      yeah right

      Yawn.. and on those you would run ? What OpenSolaris ?

      Funny enough 2x8 chip 'cheap' 8-way Nehalem-E machines like for example the DL980 costs about the same as 1x8 chip very expensive 8 way power 770.

      And then there is discount, and software licenses and and.. Nahh.. POWER isn't that expensive anymore.. Why don't you try to compare the new machines against your former champion the T5XXX series from Oracle.

      http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/710/browse_aix.html

      versus

      https://shop.sun.com/store/product/c7288201-e2ff-11db-8c3c-080020a9ed93?intcmp=soc

      https://shop.sun.com/store/product/6bfd9efc-e300-11db-8c3c-080020a9ed93?intcmp=soc

      versus

      http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/720/browse_aix.html

      https://shop.sun.com/store/product/b057c0d5-f740-11db-8c3c-080020a9ed93?intcmp=soc

      versus

      http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/740/browse_aix.html

      And this is at similar socket and core count, not similar performance.

      // Jesper

  3. zooooooom

    dud?

    Don't all manufacturers do this? A part that fails at XGHz with Y cores gets sold as a ZGHz,/W core chip where X>=Z and Y>=W. Are we singling out the big blue for some particular reason?

  4. kiwii

    Never pay rack rate for a hotel

    The thing to remember here is that no one pays the full price on Power servers. The prices are stupidly high so that they can make corporations feel special when they give them a "special" rate. Its more like the hotel industry than the PC market.

    Still, getting a big-ass discount doesn't mean that it is anywhere near cheap, but like the first commenter said, you get what you pay for.

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