Posts by Matt Bryant

RE: MB and the clock speed

<Yawn> Still waiting for that intelligent IBMer to post a comment.... There is at least one out there, isn't there?

RE: Not a total Mushroom

Beware of pale imitations!

"....Linux? who needs Linux...." <Yawn> Please go check whom is the leading Linux server vendor and I think you'll still find it is hp by a country mile, as it has been for many years.

"....ok so only buy the 860 or 870...." Interesting that the IBMers are FUDing the 8-socket blade and Superdome2 so hard. By the way, when it IBM going to release an 8-socket Power7 blade? And how big will the new top-end pSeries be when it finally gets here - a whole rack?

"....=> yes but I would not say cobbled....they have a bladelink...." Hold on a sec, didn't you IBMers state that hp wouldn't be able to link the blades together without sx3000? Sounds like you need to do more research for your next FUD guide.

".....=> Yes, but 8GB is expensive...." And will run at full frequency in the new Integrity blades, not 20% speed crippled as in the IBM Power7 blades, which will have 30% speed crippled cores anyway. All that crippling is so IBM can keep the heat and power within the low limits that the H-chassis can cope with. If you have an alternative explanation I'm sure we'd all love to hear it.

".....=> Yes Superdome2 is a great preview. Dates, availability and specs will be later but has a cool rack door....." Specs are out, did you miss that bit? Want me to translate the spec sheet into monosyllabic words for you? And the Superdome2 looks like a big blade chassis that I am looking forward to racking it into a regular cab rather than the extra-wide ones the old SDs came in. Not really too bothered whether it looks "cool" as I'm hoping it will be as reliable as the ones we have now, which means once it's racked in I probably won't have to actually go look at it for a long time. Not surprised you IBMers want something "cool" or "pretty" seeing as you have to spend so much more time with IBM Global Screwups fixing your "solutions".

".....=> Yes....Partitioning is old technology anyways...." Yes, please do go there, we'd all like to laugh if you try and compare the IBM tech to hp's Partitioning Continuum. Face it - even without vpars, hp-ux still has a massively better partitioning and virtualising solution than IBM. Please refer back to my query regarding whether Power7 will actually have real hardware partitioning with electrical isolation, I beleive you IBMers have avoided answering that one for quite a while.

"....=> Yes but you can also buy what you need now..." Well, you can if you do your sizing right rather than blindly believing IBM's benchmarks. Strange that rPerf doesn't reflect IBM's own benchmark FUD.

"....=> Yes..but FCoE is over blown and not standard....." Surely you can try harder than that? Are you seriously going to argue that customers should implement non-standardised kit they may have to swap out in a year's time? Oh, sorry, I forgot - you flog IBM kit! You're used to having to swap it out yearly when it doesn't do the job!

"....You want to dump CISCO anyways" Well, it might be an idea to look at the new hp networking gear seeing as hp offers one-throat-to-choke for your datacenter and front-office hardware. Oh, sorry, you probably didn't want me to point that out seeing as IBM had to pull out of the desktop market, are gradually pulling out of the x64 server market (how much of it is being passed to Lenovo?), and doesn't have an inhouse networking capability.

/SP&L

RE: Where are the datasheets?

".....Could you point to any information on the Superdome 2?...." Nope. If I try www.hp.com/go/superdome2 I get a static page with just the "contact a sales advisor link". Off the main (old) Superdome page there is a link to a brochure (http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/downloads/HP_Integrity_Superdome2_TPCH-1TB_April2010.pdf) but is little more than the type of pretty picture exercise you throw at management to keep them quiet. I suppose you'll just have to call the advisor.

".....Also, I don't see any benchmarks released except for a TPC-H@1000GB benchmark which HP compared to a 2 year old Enterprise M9000...." Personally, I don't put much value in vendor benchmarks, but if it floats your boat I'm sure there will be plenty out soon.

".....HP seems to have avoided the one at 3000GB since there is a POWER6 result there....." Ah, I think I see now why you wouldn't want to call that advisor. If you want to imply that hp won't have posted a bench result just to avoid a P6 one then all I can do is smile. Seeing as the last generation of hp Integrity with Montvale Itaniums sold well against P6/P6+ pSeries I doubt if hp are too worried about comparisons with a chip design that IBM have turned their back on (the P7 is a return to the out-of-order P5 core design, away from the deadend of P6).

/SP&L

RE: Re: Dear Fanbois..

It is becoming obvious that your problems extend far beyond your vacuous posts. I do admire that you have moved on from the usual FUDers ranting to an attempt at assuming a role of superiority, but I sense there is only a whisker of control holding you back from the usual raging. It will be interesting to see how long you can maintain that stance without collapsing back into the usual squealing and name-calling.

".....You need to learn where your position in life actually is...." My position is quite comnfortably seated in front of the monitor, cup of java to one side and usually a choc biccie within reach. I'm not too happy with my desk but then that's probably just me being a finicky old git. But, please feel free to think whatever you like about my state of employment. I have already stated quite clearly that I don't work for a vendor or reseller, despite other ranting posters here having accused me of working for both IBM and hp! Don't worry, I'm not even going to suggest you are in gainful employment, let alone working for IBM.

".....As the most unbelievably biased person I've ever seen post...." Ah, it's the old selective vision trick! "I only see Matt's posts as biased, all other posts are completely balanced". I would suggest at least a visit to Specsavers.

".....and yet your surprised when people needle you?..." Well, more amused really, kinda like when you see a kitten taking clumsy swipes at an adult cat, it all looks so cute, but you know the big cat is only going to tolerate so much before they firmly put the kitten in its place. I suppose it's how the kitten learns, so I have to hope that you too will learn something from these posts. Like maybe a hint of technical reality.

"....I'm accused of being obsessive by the guy who sounds like he'd ejaculate...." Actually I'd more characterise you as childish with what sounds like some sexual hangups. Please note that my company would probably nor endorse any such talks for hp, but making fun of you here under a pseudonymn is probably not a problem for them. In fact, they probably see it as a service to the community to keep buffoons such as yourself busy posting your bile here so you are far away from real industry work!

"....Consider yourself more like a fish cruelly hooked..." Heck, if it makes you feel better you can imagine me as anything you like! There seems to be a fair bit of fantasy going on in at least your technical life so I'm sure a little more delusion won't matter much. Maybe it would be best if you talked it over with someone professionally qualified to deal with your "issues". This is, after all, a tech forum, not a psychiatrist's office.

"....Always amusing seeing how long the replies get as an indicator of your wilingness to bite...." Well, when you get your systems up and running well, and your monitoring works, it does give you plenty of time to go on the Web and poke fun out of the less fortunate. But then I suppose that's the benefit of buying hp! <= note, added needle just to make you froth harder!

".....So Matt, thanks for the entertainment, keep it up!...." Anything to please if it keeps you off the streets and away from us customers! Please bear in mind that offer does not extend to the ejaculatory services you obsessed about above. By the way, our commercial firewall picks up certain words and phrases from a library that comes with the package, and it didn't like "ejaculate"! If they have a similar filter then you may have to explain that to the your ward's matron when she does her rounds.

/SP&L

RE: FCOE

"....You're wrong. FC-BB-5 was finished up last year (june 2009)...." The FC-BB-5 FCOE draft was completed by the T-11 working group, NOT standardised as an industry standard, in June 2009. Most manufacturers are waiting for the final standardised offering so they don't have to go back and update or replace units shipped now to meet a later final standard. You can find out more here http://www.t11.org/fcoe, where it clearly states "....."Fibre Channel over Ethernet" (FCoE) is the present name given to a technology being developed within TC T11 as part of the FC-BB-5 project...."

Try again, again!

/SP&L

RE: re: Looks like the challange has been made

".....MB is a HP Employee and is lying, as usual....." I know you FUDers have an attention span that makes a goldfish look skilled, but I have already stated many times I do not work for hp or an hp reseller, nor am I paid by hp or an hp reseller to do marketting work. With your goldfish-like level of recall I suppose you must have forgotten that the Sunshiners on these forums have previously accused me of working for IBM. Just get over your paranoia and accept not everyone is going to share your World view, especially when your viewpoint is so limited and expressed in such a vacuous manner.

".....MB is not as important of a customer to HP as he claims....." I have had some NDA information on the new Integrity blades for a while, thanks. Not surprisng, seeing as we have a large number of the current Integrity and ProLiant blades. That last bit of info won't help you much in guessing where I work as I understand most - if not all - of the Fortune 500 also have both.

Now, try and post something vaguely technical. If you can. I know it seems the Moderatrix gives free rein to you IBMers to post anything you like regardless, but it might actually improve our perception of you if your posts had the slightest technical merit. Mind you, I'm not holding my breath.

/SP&L

RE: Thanks Matt

".....Even the most determined decision makers and/or influencers in HP shops considering a change to IBM are not as extreme as Matt in their defense of HP Itanium Systems....." Here's news for you - I support the purchase of Power in our business when Power is the best option. I look at proposals from IBM and hp for each instance and judge on what they can actually do for us, not just the marketting schpiel. Whilst I do have a pref for hp-ux over AIX, that is not the kind of blind denial you get from the Sunshiners. When I'm working I give equal airtime to IBM and hp teams. However, on these forums, you only get the worst repetition of FUD and denial passed off as "fact" by you IBMers. I dislike FUDers from a professional viewpoint, so don't be surprised if being the largest FUD generators on here also sees you getting the most replies from me.

"....So it has been very handy to read his views every now and then to prepare for possible objections from those with a less open mind to change....." I actually don't have a problem with that. In fact, if I post something here that stops the usual IBM FUD being thrust upon some other customer then I consider it a service to the IT community!

".....In recent times loosing business against HP Itanium Systems has become an increasingly rare event....." I take it from "loosing" you meant "losing"? I see that written English is still not a biggie with IBM sales then? I suggest you will find that you are "loosing" to Itanium less is because you are being considered for less and less opportunities where Integrity is winning by default. After all, we went over the Gartner figures in a previous thread, and they show that hp is selling the high-end kit, not IBM. But, if you think you are winning, maybe you should link up with Jesper as he has been moaning that EDS keep handing him his butt on a plate when his outsourcing company lead with Power (http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/04/13/ibm_power7_blades/#c_742195).

Here's the news, as pointed out to Jesper - I did five minutes of amateur investigation and found three simple points I could use to FUD the new Power blades, just to show him how easy it was. All the cobblers you lot sprout on here takes the same minor effort to poke bus-size holes in. If you are banking on my examples being the worst you will come up against then I would suggest you do a LOT more homework. Why? Because I have seen the work that comes out of the Elmers at places like EMC, hp, CISCO, Soreacle ( in London we generally refer to professional "competitive analysts" AKA FUDers as "Elmers" from Bugs Bunny's Elmer Fudd). The Elmers will take a piece of competing hardware to pieces and minutely examine it in the labs, not spend five minutes scanning the IBM webby. I saw the quality of the hp analysis that showed the old IBM blade chassis had non-redundant and active electrical components in the backplane that were SPOFs, or how they proved the old IBM blade chassis couldn't run a full complement of blades and redundant switches by careful measurement of electrical draw and power supplies. They will be casting a very careful and skilled eye over the new Power7 kit and highlighting the design issues that there always seem to be in IBM kit. I suggest you better prepare a lot more.

/SP&L

RE: Looks like the challange has been made

<Yawn> And still waiting..... Actually, getting bored of waiting, so I suppose I'll just have to poke fun at Aelfric. By the way, did you know there was supposedly a King Aelfric of Kent? Well, according to St Bede, but modern historians have described him as a fantasy king created to fill a gap in monastic records. How appropriate!

"....Matt Bryant will have to answer yes or no to the "FUD" on Tuesday...." Considering you seem very sure of yourself I'm going to have to assume you are actually in breach of an hp NDA agreement. If not, then it must be just more fantasy. If it is in breach f an NDA then I'm betting you have tried to paint as bad a picture as possible, so let's look at what you have to offer....

".....1) HP will only announce blade Tukwila systems...no rack based systems...." I've been told it is an Integrity BLADES event, so I would only expect blades to be announced. Do IBM announce their mairframes at Power blade events?

".....2) HP will not mention Linux in regards to Tukwila systems..." Lol! Even if you are leaking real technical news, you can only guess at what the speakers will actually say, or are you now claiming to be their speechwriter?

".....3) The Tukwila blades will not have SX3000 glue chips so the 8 socket system will require chip hopping as Tukwila only has 5 QPI's...." Why would you expect a dual-socket blade to use a four-socket chipset? If BL860 is to have 8 cores as you say then it will be dual-socket, and then if the BL870 is to be two BL860 s then that's two dual-socket motherboards, not a single four-socket. Do you even think before you trype (sic)?

"....4) vPar will not be supported wtih Tukwila...." They're announcing blades at this event. The users I speak with are using IVM with the current Inetgrity blades rather than vpars, so why you think it is news the new ones won't is beyond me. Oh, I get it - you couldn't think of a real issue so you decided to make one up! I suppose you don't want me to predict that Inetgrity Virtual Machines (whcih offers CPU or sub-CPU granularity of virtulaisation, so better than just vpars) will be supported out-of-the-box?

"....5) The "Scalable bladelink" is a big connection on the front of the blades which will restrict airflow..." Assuming you mean the link between blades acting in a single OS image, that would only require a narrow ribbon cable, not a great big item, so very little impact on airflow. How do I know? Well, if you look in the back of an SD64 you can see the inter-cab link that carries traffic for SIXTEEN cellboards (each equivalent to a BL860, so a lot more traffic than between just TWO blades), and that is just a brown ribbon cable about 5-odd cm wide. Then again, I suspect you have never even seen an SD64, let alone looked inside.

"....6) The BL860 is 8 core, 24 DIMM slots 2 hot swap SAS HDDs 4 GBe and 3 PCIi...." Hold on a sec, you're supposed to be making the hp kit look bad! Didn't you realise that's far better than the PS701 Power blade's spec? After all, the PS701 only has sixteen RAM slots, 2 mezz card slots (PCIi), and no hot-pluggable disks, and only two LAN links! Lol, I can see why EDS "let you go", you just keep doing the opposition favours!

"....7) The blades will only supports 4GB dimms at release, 8 GB is 3Q 2010, 16GB is 4Q 2010..." The IBM blades do have 8GB DDR3 DIMMs (well, when you actually get them, which will probably not be for a while yet). Of course, you have to drop the bus speed from 1GHz to 800MHz to use the 8GB DIMMs in the Power blades - I wonder what impact that has on performance? Then again, seeing as the Power blades will have 3GHz crippled cores (nowhere near as fast as the Power rack servers will eventually get), I don't suppose it will make that much difference having everything in the blade crippled. And the BL860 will have more RAM slots anyway.

"....9) HP will try to slow the defections off of HP-UX by offering socket based pricing but since Tukwila is only 4 cores per chips its not that big of a deal....." A bizarre statement. You can already get the base hp-ux 11i v3 OE for free with any Integrity server. The other OEs (Operating Environments - think software bundles with a single licence) have always been priced per core, so surely you have just told all the hp-ux base they can expect a 50% cut in OS costs if they upgrade? Another favour for the enemy - you sure you really want to try this FUDing thing, you just don't seem very good at it!

".....10) Open VMS is not supported till Q3 2010...." <Shrug> Not an OpenVMS bunny so doesn't really affect or bother me. But, seeing as IBM failed to poach even a fraction of the Alpha-VMS base when Compaq was bought by hp I can't see there suddenly being a rush to Power now.

".....11) nPars is 2Q 2011 and vPar is NEVER...." Ah, I see that you don't think before you trype. For those that may not know, npars are hardware partitions, i.e. the means to link more than one Integrity cellboard together. But, Aelfric already said "...."Scalable bladelink" is a big connection on the front of the blades....", which kind of implies the ability to hardware link blades (i.e., create npars) is already there at launch. As for vpars, see my comment above about IVM.

"......12) if you want to upgrade a 860 to a 870 or a 870 to a 890 you have to wait for the field upgrade kits in Q1 2011...." Or you could just order an 870 instead of an 860 in the first place. It's not unusual for upgrade kits to arrive well after a launch as most customers don't think about upgrading for at least a year AFTER they buy kit. We certainly don't buy servers and immediately upgrade them. Then again, we do proper planning an POCs, whereas IBM seem to expect customers to just take Power on the basis of some SPEC benchmarks and then have IBM Global Scewups onsite for a year trying to get the solution working. I suppose IBM have to supply upgrades immediately given their awful scoping work.

"....13) Want to do FCoE? You have to wait till Q2 2011....." Could that be because the FCoE standard is not expect ed until April 2011 EARLIEST? Any FCoE kit you buy now could be rendered obsolete overnight if the standard differs to what the vendors are guessing it will look like. And that also means any FCoE kit bought now will also likely not work with another vendor's as they are all doing their own thing. In the meantime, hp will sell you an FCIP solution using MX400 routers if you really don't want darkfibre links, and those FCIP routers work fine with the existing hp blade chassis switches. So, another non-point.

No need to wait for Tuesday. The answers to the above show that EDS were only too smart to treat you like the trash and bin you. Now, can the IBMers please put up a real troll? Maybe three or more of you can get together and pool resources, make a real effort?

/SP&L

RE: MBtard

"Matt, Veritas softwares were always bundled together with Solaris until ZFS came out...." You missed my point - Veritas released products on Slowaris and hp-ux because that's what they're customers wanted. IBM's AIX lagged years behind either. I agree that Sun switched to ZFS though probably to save on paying Veritas licensing costs.

"....AIX didnt need any of tools because of the JFS and then JFS2 free of charge....." Having tried to get IBM AIX kit working with the Veritas tools we already used on Slowaris and hp-ux, I'd laugh at your comment but the memory is too painful. I'd rather use Veritas on Slowaris than AIX's versions, though don't tell the Sunshiners that!

"....And, dont tell us PowerHA (not HACMP for sometime) is lagging behind HP MC Service Guard....." We're talking history here (though I personally think PowerHA still lags MC/SG, but then that's just my opinion). Historically, HACMP was a complete dog compared to ServiceGuard, and the problems upgrading between version were legion! It wouldn't have been so bad if AIX's option for partitioning hadn't always lagged hp-ux as well - how many years after npars was it before AIX got proper hardware partitions which were actually electrically isolated? Have they even got them yet, even with P7? And I still remember the fun of IBM trying to sell us their Integrated Virtualization Manager software, which didn't work with their PLM software or their Hardware Management Console, and wasn't even supported on the P570s they were recommending! In comparison, hp's offerings for partitioning and clustering have always been much better integrated, especialy when it came to management tools.

Try again!

/SP&L

RE: "falling flat on your faces."

".....Most of the stuff you talk about as differentiating HP's IA64 offerings from IBM's high-end or mid-range offerings (or Sun's offerings) is ***pure software*** (Veritas Cluster etc)...." Yes, which is exactly the point! If the AIX-Power combo was so much amazingly better than anything else on the market then history would show a rush of software vendors working on AIX first, then Slowaris (because of the installed base), then hp-ux as an afterthought. However, the last ten years have seen software vendors working much harder on Slowaris and hp-ux software than AIX, with Veritas being a very good example. It wasn't until late 2002 IIRC that AIX finally got the same tools as Slowaris and hp-ux had had for years, despite IBM paying Veritas to start a joint dev program back in 2000. That joint dev program came around when IBM finally admitted it was obvious that having common Veritas toolsets on Slowaris and hp-ux was allowing Sun and hp to gain more of the enterprise UNIX pie.

The Oracle example is equally valid - over the same last ten years, IBM tried to push DB2 on AIX on Power, which didn't compare to Oracle on either Slowaris-SPARC or hp-ux-Itanium. Oracle's own customers pushed for Oracle on hp-ux to be given equal development speed as Oracle on Slowaris (Sun was Oracle's prefered partner for years). There wasn't any similar push for Oracle on AIX-Power. All of which seems to blow great big holes in the amusing idea that customers rushed to AIX-Power in preference over hpux-Itanium or SPARC-Slowaris.

".....If the only differentiator between x86 and IA64 is not hardware but is OS-class software, surely it doesn't bode well for The IA64 Inside in the medium term? Is there any other differentiator...." Scale. And the available apps that take advantage of that scale. Outside that, there is very little reason to run anything on commercial UNIX on a trad RISC/EPIC platform when you can run it on Linux on x64. But, seeing as hp dominate the Linux on x64 market, I can't see them being too upset about that!

RE: monkeys throwing poo aside

Spot the Sunshiner - still can't get over the hp ink bizz making more money in a quarter than SPARC ever made Sun! It's amazing that they still can't get a hold of that whole product diversity idea, as though having a product outside of UNIX that makes a profit is somehow beneath them. Don't worry, your defeat has already been widely acknowledged, or did you just forget that whole Sunset episode?

If any product should be refered to the Cimarron then I would suggest the Rock is a far better candidate. Then again, that would be unfair to the Cimarron - at least the Cimarron made it into production!

/SP&L @ the Sunshiners, the gift that just keep on giving!

RE: Why Matt B likes Itanium

Well, I do like bananas! Not sure if Ms Bee will allow you to call the IBMers a bunch of monkeys for long, though.

RE: Oh ?

"So what OS version does the POWER7...need ?...." Aw, ickle Jesper is trying to play all innocent, when he knows perfectly well that P6/6+ was a complete change from P5 (from out-of-order execution to in-order) and that now P7 is a return to little more than lots of P5 cores shrunk onto the same die (so back to out-of-order, because IBM hit the buffers on the P6/6+ design). Which means any apps written for P5 had to have a rewrite to run best on P6 (otherwise they could even perform WORSE on P6 than they did on P5!), and now P6/6+ apps will need a rewrite to be optimised for P7. He also knows that the few new features in P7 won't be unlocked until customers get the next gen of AIX, version 7.x (by the way, when is that likely to be?). All the P6 apps won't work to their best until they're rewritten for P7 and AIX 7.x (and all the iSeries apps too will need updating by the look of this article). And considering that only a fool would put a brand-new version of an OS into production, that means at least six months (probably a year) after the Power7 servers actually become available to customers they will still be stumbling along with AIX 6.1. Who knows when the combination of new CPU, new chipsets, new OS and rewritten apps will be ready for primetime? 2011?

".....Lets guess 5.3 and 6.1....." Not if they want to get what they paid for! In fact, if the app they run has been optimised for AIX 6.1 on P6/6+ then it may even go SLOWER on P7! And does IBM have longterm plans to develop into 5.3 the features of 6.1 or planned for 7.x? More to the point, will they really be happy to support AIX 5.x, 6.x and 7.x concurrently? And what's the point of upgrading to P7 instead of just buying the current (and price-reduced) P6/6+ range if you're not getting what IBM will be charging you the extra for?

The truth is IBM rushed forward the Power7 release becasue Nehalem and Tukzilla were going to arrive first and they wanted to have something to announce. So they had to announce it long before the high-end servers were ready, and long before AIX7 was even close to release. Jesper knows that, despite his pretending it has no impact.

/SP&L

RE: Whats that supposed to be?

"....is that all of a flamebait you can muster?...." Insert faux surprise here that the IBMers aren't keen to admit an upgrade to Power7 is pointless unless you revalidate/upgrade your whole software stack. Just like it as from Power5 to Power6. Whilst the IBM trolls like to froth about fantasy performance comparisons and make all kind of implications about Itanium, they aren't happy to discuss known and admitted issues with Power. Of course, Tukzilla will run all the current hp-ux, OpenVMS, Windows and Linux stacks as currently run on Montvale Itanium kit without the need for a change and with improved performance. And we all know changing the stack is a lot harder and entails more risk than changing the underlying hardware. Discuss!*

/SP&L

*IBM trolls - whilst this is an invite for you to respond, please try and formulate a logical argument, not just the usual "Power is great, Itanic is dead - you know it, you know it, I'll scream and cry until I'm blue in the face if you all don't admit it!"

RE: Desperate is the word

Yes, desperate is the word I would use to describe the whole Power7 launch. Terrified of Nehalem and Tukzilla, IBM have announced more vapourware that won't be available to customers for months (high-end probably not until 2011?), and then won't be able to perform to its best until a new version of AIX arrives (maybe late 2010, more likely 2011?) and all the applications are available for that version (at best 2011). As regards your reply, I'd use the words presumption and avoidance.

"....So you are basically taking POWER5+ from 2005, and comparing it to a unspecified dual-core itanium, Must be Montvale which is ok. Montvale is from 2007....." Presume again. The 2.2GHz Power5+ systems in question didn't arrive until 2006, and went up againt Monetcito Itaniums in an hp Integrity Superdome hardware partition that year. The Superdome solution (tested with RHEL and hp-ux) was faster and cheaper than the IBM solution with an Oracle/SAP stack and an EMC array. We let IBM and their reseller do the tuning for the IBM solution over a two week period. The hp solution was faster out-of-the-box. When we looked at the upgrade to Montvale we went back and tested it against a revised IBM solution using P6 CPUs - IBM still lost.

"....All SAP ECC 6.0 numbers....." And here we go with the avoidance. More vendor benchmarks to try and imply every business runs just like an IBM labs benchmark session.

""....IVM is not something we use...."" As for IVM, I happen to like the product and championed its use in our own consolidation work, so if your own "experts" advise against it that's not my problem. It doesn't mean we don't have Integrity servers using npars and vpars because in some situations they are the better option. I suggest you do a lot more reading up on the hp Partitioning Continuum before condemning the use of vpars or npars. Then again, maybe not as I really don't want an outsourcer getting better at their job, thanks!

"....And what are they going to do.. migrate it all to x86 blades....." Where do you think a large portion of our SPARC-Slowaris went? I would have loved to port it all to hp-ux, but it was a much better business case to move it to RHEL on ProLiant. We have also replaced some older Power and PA-RISC servers with Lintel for the same reason - it is much cheaper, especially on hp blades! I'm pretty sure if your outsourcing salemen had had an xseries and Linux solution ready to put up against EDS's offering then you might have stood a better chance, but - as with most IBM-centric salesteams - yours seems to have thought AIX-on-pSeries and nothing else. Which reminds me of the same attitude from the old SPARC-Slowaris salesgrunts that used to try selling to us, and look what happened to them.

".....Who cares as long as the blades have superior price performance compared to the competition...." It's easy to postulate three reasons customers will care. Firstly, specialised memory will be more expensive (just through economies of scale), so when customers look to upgrade beyond the subsidised memory prices in the standard bundles they will suddenly find the RAM sticks are pricier. Secondly, specialised RAM will lag in development behind standard RAM, which means IBM will either have to pay more to keep abreast (making the RAM more expensive again) or lag in offering RAM upgrades compared to competitors. Thirdly, specialised RAM reduces the choice of suppliers, meaning IBM cannot take advantage of the number of RAM manufacturers as a server vendor using standard RAM sticks, so what happens if your limited choice of RAM suppliers (probably just one) has a problem delivering to demand or a problem in fabrication? All three points will impact the price/performance comparison, which is why us customers will care.

"....And nice.. reading manuals and redbooks trying to find weaknesses...." Why are you so upset that a customer should want to read the publicly available documentation that explains the product? Isn't that the point of the Redbooks? Or do you think us customers should just shut up and take your word as gospel? Not likley! Think of it this way - I'm an amateur FUDist at worst, but the technical marketting people from hp, Soreacle, Fudgeitso and even CISCO will be going over all the IBM documentation with a fine toothcomb, looking for anything that can be pointed to as a possible issue (or FUDed, if you prefer) in the new P7 designs. Given the resources they have I'm sure they will do a darn sight better job than I can, so if you find my amateur attempts (sparked by jlocke and co's stupidity, not mailce), then I think you're going to really cry like a baby when those experts get to work! And don't act so innocent, IBM do exactly the same with competitor kit.

/Shakng my head in disbelief but SP&L.

RE: Matt Bryant

"....What quad-core Power?...." Try Power5+ QCMs, which IBM flogged as "quad-core". Montecito versions of dual-core Itaniums walked all over them in our tests, let alone Montvale. Oh, and thanks for pointing out that IBM customers going from a current Power6 server to the new Power7 ones (when they eventually ship) will see their software licence costs quadruple. Now, how much of a point did the IBM FUD make of this with Niagara and Nehalem? A quick look through posts to these forums will show you how hard IBMers hammered that point, but suddenly it doesn't apply to Power, for some unexplained reason.

Just to make it clear to you IBMers that obviously don't actually work with enterprise servers, just having an "uber fast" CPU is not going to solve all your problems. For the last ten-plus years the industry has been more concerned with implementing high-speed connections between CPUs and memory, disk, SAN and LAN, because CPU speeds were well ahead of what the rest of the system could supply. Whilst IBM like to concentrate on a very tiny set of benchmarks that highlight pure core throughput, the reality is this is curently not the issue with real World applications. The IBM TPC record was a good exampe where IBM had to use a rediculous database and storage setup ($4m of SAN!?!?!) to keep the Power chips spinning. Even IBM have been forced to admit the doubling of CPU core speed in P5 to P6 only produced a 10% gain in performance at the coalface, which just goes to show how badly IBM did on optimising the rest of the system.

Instead, hp have concentrated for years on making the whole system (OS, CPUs, interconnects, memory, etc) work better rather than just selling CPUs that spend most of their time idling. Now, if that wasn't true, hp would never have sold a single Integrity server if Power made the pSeries just so gosh-darn fast as you lot like to claim. The facts say otherwise, indeed the recent Gratner figures as discussed here on the Reg forums show hp are picking up more of the high-end deals, not IBM. Seeing as there is no way that massive chip on your shoulder will let you ever consider any benchmark I can post to prove that Integrity can beat pSeries, I'll just let the benchmark of the market show how wrong you are.

"....Where do you get this nonsense from?...." Please try and deny that P6 was a diferent architecture with in-order execution, whereas P7 is a return to out-of-order execution, as last seen in P5. Please also try and deny that P7 pics look just like lots of P5 cores squeezed onto a die. Why "please"? Because I need a good laugh.

".....If it very specialised and high cost, then how come an equivalent Power7 blade with the same amount of RAM, double the amount of cores and 4x the performance is going to cost a lot less than your beloved upcoming Tukzilla baldes?...." I'll tell you what - when you actually have two quotes for the same solution from hp and IBM to meet the same real World case, then we'll see. Until then, any pricing is just sales waffle as neither product is available to us customers today. It wouldn't be the first time a product was announced at one price and there was a price hike by the time it actually hit the streets.

".....Your posts are a joke." <Insert the sound of laughing here. At you.>

/SP&L

RE: Yeah right..

"....I think they are only good for HPC like workloads....." Great for consolidation of existing UNIX systems too! And seeing as the word (subject to official hp confirmation) seems to be that hp will have the means to link their blades into larger SMP instances, it looks like they will be even more useful for replacing existing larger rack servers.

"...As for using a benchmark on the BL870c, it is not like HP is shipping anything else....." Well, IBM aren't shipping the PS70x blades either, yet. Please go try and get a delivery date, until then you are comparing IBM vapourware with existing hp kit.

And then you go off into specint fantasyland again. I'm losing count of the number of times I've told you that vendor benchmarks are completely irrellevant - did IBM do their usual trick and have a sub-$100k server using $4m of short-stroked storage for their benchmark? I'll tell you what, why don't you try and reproduce the IBM figures in your envirnoment (when IBM actually ship the PS70x blades that is). Then try with getting a whole chassis of blades to hit the same figure as your first run. You'll probably find the drop in available bandwidth as the blades share switch resources means the average performance drops to well below the best solo specint figure you can get, or that they brown-out or overheat as the IBM chassis just can't run all their blades at full load. Either way, you won't get the IBM lab figures, and they still won't show how your blades will behave with a real World app stack. I see you still don't supply the name of a business that runs specint as it's main app.

"....And yes software will be more expensive...." Yes, which means you can either do the job with hp kit and save money, or buy more hp kit for the same price and do more than the IBM solution. Come on, you IBMers have been FUDing Niagara for years on licensing costs, it's not like you can suddenly pretend it doesn't affect Power7.

".....Itanium blades are slower and more expensive, it really is that simple." And again - until you have benched both you can say all you like, but you're talking from your arse.

/SP&L

RE: disappointed

Sorry, Ms Kebabfart, but I don't usually Google on principle. The search didn't work on Yahoo so I slapped it into Google and promptly got a security warning! I think I'll just email our hp rep and see if he admits the price list did exist. Either way, all you have managed to ascertain is the model number (BL890c) and a few option codes, which hardly goes any way to confirm any of the wild suggestions you and the rest of the IBMers have made. Try again!

RE: Matty , the clown

"....Hot plug disks? Since when this really matters?..." Well, we found them useful enough that we more often buy hp blades than IBM ones.

"....Do your blades boots from SAN or what?..." Not all of them. In fact, we have some blades in regional offices without any SAN connections. How do you suggest we boot from SAN for those?

"....About core frequency that happens to all vendors when you go into multi-core designs...." But all you IBMers have been FUDing Itanium for years on the claim that Power6 had to be better just and only because it was 5GHz, and that Power7 would be even faster! Well, P7 is here, and it has a slower clock than P6, and the P7 blades will be further limited to 3GHz cores. I'm not surprised you're now backing away from your "frequency uber alles" blather.

"....Sorry, Itanic stops at quad...." Seeing as dual-core Itaniums have been beating quad-core Power in real World applications I can't say I'm too worried about how a quad-core Tukzilla will measure up against an octo-core P7, especially as the cores on the P7 are a step backwards to the P5 design. Until I have both to bench, I can happilly ignore your frothing and FUD.

"....You are really funny Matty!...." Gald you think so. Unfortuantely, I can only describe you as tragic.

"....Performance is not related to clock frequency...." Please tell the other IBM FUDers. Please write it on a Post-It note and stick it on the edge of your monitor, so the next time you are comparing Power to other chips and you feel the urge to squeal on about "frequency uber alles", you'll realise how stupid you sound and save yourself further embarassment.

I've just found the IBM Redbook for the new Power7 blades (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4655.html) and it descibes the memory sticks as "VLP", which I assume means "very low profile", probably to get them to sit at 90 degrees to the motherboard - looks like IBM had to go for specialised and very expensive memory rather than the standard DDR3 Tukzilla will be using. It also has some interesting diagrams for the PS70x blades, showing that IBM had to put the internal disk right at the rear of the blade so they could put the RAM at the front where it stood a chance of staying cool. With the PS700, where they have two internal disks, they had to sacrifice half the memory slots, and still could not make the disks hot-pluggable! Please also note you have to drop from 1066MHz to 800MHz when using the larger IBM memory sticks. More interestingly, it lets slip on page 46 that the 3GHz Power7 CPU in the PS70x blades only has a single memory controller to feed all eight cores - no bottleneck there then!

I'm going to stop there as I'm not getting paid to bash IBM kit, even if it is amusing to see how it makes jlocke and co spin like an Iraniam centrifuge! As I said before, at best it's all conjectuire until I actually get some kit to play wiht. Now, someone please take AC back to the nursery and put his toys back in his pram for him.

/SP&L

RE: Oh Matt

"....You found one aspect where HP is better..." Given hp's lead in installed blades marketshare I'd suggest us customers found a few other areas besides just hot-plug disks.

"....I don't know...." Yes, I'm beginning to think the boundaries to what you know encompass a very small area of either experience or technical knowledge.

I have noticed that the datasheets for the new IBM Power7 blades don't have any details on power consumption. The IBM EnergyEstimator also doesn't have any guidance on the new blades. Are we looking at the possibility that IBM have yet again produced a blade product only to find their chassis cannot supply enough power to run all the blades at load and a full set of switches? Are we going to see more IBM excuses about customers running most of the blades at 20% util for 80% of the time? Yeah, that should really work when we hit that end of year peak!

"....Power efficiency probably is the strong point of the SPARC multicores...." Ah, so now we see why you know so little about the hp or IBM kit - you're just another Sunshiner! No wonder blades are such a mystery to you given that Sun's blade offerings have always been comedic!

/SP&L

RE: Bla Bla Bla

"Who cares about blades, It's a dead end anyway...." Jesper, I'm shocked you could even post that! Both IBM and hp have stressed how important blades are to them, and their sentiments are echoed by the likes of Gartner and IDC, which both correctly predicted blades would be a massive growth area. To simply write them off like that comes accross a bit petulant, like a child sulkily saying "well who cares what anyone else thinks!"

Then you wander off into more irrellevant benchmarks. Please, show me the one busines that runs specint_rate2006 as a businees as opposed to real World apps. And then you don't have any figures for the new Tukzilla blades to compare to the carefully crafted PS701 or PS702 results, instead you compare with the old BL870c with the slower 9150N CPUs and DDR2 memory. The new Tukzilla blade is going to be much quicker than the BL870c just through using DDR3 memory, so your comaprison is quite pointless, even before we consider that the PS702 you mention had 16 cores and therefore double the software licence costs of the BL870c (not surprised you didn't factor that into your cost analysis).

As to all your posts which relie on vendor benchmarks, I shall reply with the usual advice - until you run a server in your environment, with your OS build, software stack, LAN and SAN, you cannot accurately predict performance, and any vendor benchmark should be treated at best as guidance. I bet you can't get IBM to guarantee every customer will get the same specint_rate2006 result in their environments and they got in IBM's labs. I know you won't as every time a vendor salesgrunt tries to push vendor benchmarks I simply ask them to guarantee I will get that exact performance, and so far it has proven a great way to shut them up!

/disappointed, TBH.

RE: HP leaks Tukwila blade prices...pricey for a poor design

"We all know HP's plan..." Well, the truth is we don't all know, which rather sets the expectation that the rest of your post is going to be more unsubstantiated waffle and FUD.

"....The problem with HP's tukwila blades is they only have 4 cores...." Strangely enough, IBM said qaud-core was great when it was for P6. And dual-core Itaniums still beat quad-core P6 in many deals, which suggests having four cores which can't be kept spinning is really not much of an advantage compared to a dual-core system desinged to be efficient in all stages.

"...I am hearing 4/27 will be date for the BL860/BL870/BL890 blade offerings...." Hearing from where? Your anus? The BL860c and BL870c are current product numbers so it is more likely that hp will use new product numbering. I haven't a clue what those numbers will be but I would suspect either BL880a ("a" as first release of the model, replacing BL860c) and BL890a (replacing the BL870c). Or they could go BL960a and BL970a. Until the hp product announcement your rectum is just guessing.

".....Here is the pricing for the systems..." The link comes back as "page cannot be found". Did you capture a copy or can we assume it was again more farting?

"....I'll be you a dinner at Hawksmoor..." Even without your flatulence problems I wouldn't consider you as an option for a dinner date. I prefer my dates to have at least one foot grounded in reality.

".....The BL860 and BL870 are decent except for the 4 cores and heat generated by 65nm old fab technology. The interconnect on the BL870 in the front looks like it will cause serious air flow problems....." Hilarious! Am IBMer trying to say hp blades have cooling issues! I'm quite certain at this point that you have never touched a blade from either hp or IBM. Did you not see my point above about the way IBM have previously been forced to angle the industry standard memory modules in their narrow blades? That's because the only way they could fit them was at an angle to the mainboard. This means they do not have the spacing you will see between DIMMs on usual motherboards where the DIMMs are at 90 degrees to the motherboard. This overlap in the IBM design reduced the airflow between the memory sticks which is just one area the IBM blades ran hot. As I understand it, the only way round this would have been for IBM to use special low-profile memory sticks, which would have been much more expensive and made the IBM blades even more uncompetitive.

It also meant they could not put hotplug disks on the front of their blades and get enough air through to the RAM, so IBM had to sacrifice hot-plug disks. As a user, we like onboard disk and SAN as they can give us advantages over just SAN disks alone, but we want them to be redundant and hot-swappable. IBM's designs don't meet this criteria, which has limited their appeal to us compared to hp blades.

"....The BL890 is an architectural albatross....." How? Please elaborate with some actual technical argument, otherwise readers will conclude you actually don't have any argument, just dribbling. Well, seeing as there is zero chance you have actually seen a BL890 it's pretty obvious that you are just dribbling.

But, if you want to compare architectures, why not explain why the "amazing" PS701 only has two mezz card slots and two onboard LAN ports, when the much older BL860c has three mezz card slots and four onboard LAN ports? Why does that matter? Well, if you want redundant SAN connections then you really want two fibre channel mezz cards, which means the PS701 then only has the two onboard LAN ports for all networking requirements. Not very good for IP-intensive work such as clustering (usually requires three+ LAN links, ideally four going through onboard and a separate mezz for redundancy) or webserving or virtualisation (two Gb ports is simply not enough for even weiner virtualised servers).

".... Without the SX3000 chipset it cannot scale efficiently past 5 sockets...." Wierd! Why is a replacement for a four-socket blade required to scale to five sockets? Where is the quint-socket Power blade? For that matter, where is the quint-socket any CPU IBM blade!?! If you're going to ruminate on complete irrelevancies you might as well enquire as to why the hp blades don't come in pink, it would be as technically lacking as your other statements.

"...And why is vPar/nPar not going to be supported anymore..." <Yawn> Once again, unless you can post a definitive hp statement to that effect, I'm going to assume it came from your nether regions. IBM have not announced what virtualisation tech will be available on Power8 with AIX7, but that doesn't mean I can immediately claim any future Power8 blade won't have a virtualisation capability.

"....Curious why there will not be a 3wide (6 socket) blade offering....." Here's where it gets really funny - why do they need a 6-socket blade!?!?! Where is the IBM equivalent if it is so vital? Get a clue! Better still, get someone else to get a clue for you, as I don't think you're capable of even finding a clue to start with.

/SP&L

RE: Eat crow Matt Bryant

<Yawn> Oh dear, the droolers really are out early today!

"....the whole world is still waiting for HP to announce Tukwila systems...." Do you even read what you right, let alone fact-check it? In one paragraph you say no hp Tukzilla systems have been announced, then in the next you insist "you and I both know" what those systems will be! Strange, are you using ESP to extract roadmap information from hp? Do you actually work for hp and want to diss your own products? Or are you an hp partner in breach of an hp NDA, maybe? Or could it be you're just wishfully talking from your nether regions? Personally, I'm going with the last option, given the rabidity of your response. Others may think it is just due to the voices in your head.

I'm guessing your only source of information (other than IBM FUD releases) is the vague CIO.com article from last October that said "....HP may introduce a modular, blade-like design for more of its Integrity systems...." - please note that's "may" and for "more of its Integrity sytstems", not all of them, and was on the back of hp having produced NonStop blades. Why that article? Beacuse it's the one I've already seen being used as FUD material by an IBM reseller. Until hp announce the final product, you're just guessing in a loud and childish manner.

PS: and I still don't see an IBM roadmap with Power8 blades on their webby; the Power7 blades announced have zero new features over the old Power6 ones, have even slower cores (3GHz vs 5GHz), and still don't have hot-plug drives; and they have killed the Cell blades. So, would you like your crow roast or fried?

/SP&L

RE: War as terror, part deux

Well, what a waste of time that was! You obviously don't have a clue about the situation in Iraq or the rules under which out troops operate. You try and paint a picture of wild, unmanaged cowboys using all and every weapon at their disposal at the drop of a hat. ".....When military forces are expected and allowed to pursue basicly endless means of destruction....." What a complete load of male bovine manure. You just sprouted paragraphs displaying nothing more than your overwhelming ignorance and anti-military prejudices.

I'll try and explain nthe simple mechanics of a military action. It really is quite simple - you need to find the enemy, identify them and kill them before they kill you, your buddies or allies. The time between finding the enemy and having to kill them is usaully very short if you want to be the ones not dying, leaving little time to go with the identification bit. Soldiers are human - they don't want to die, and they know the simplest way to ensure they don't die is to shoot first. In order to stop them shooting indiscriminantly or hesitating too long over identification, they are given rules of engagement. Despite what you think, these are not rules to tell soldiers when they can murder, they are the rules under which a soldier can act to protect his own or a colleague's or a bystander's life, and are set by legal bodies, not on a whim.

Now, I know idiots like you think the rules are stacked to the soldier's advantage, but the reality is soldiers will tell you otherwise. I'll give you the simple case as used as a training example for British troops in Iraq (the same training example was devised by US legal teams and used by all Allied units in the theatre). The situation goes like this - a soldier spots a civillian in plain clothes pulling what looks like the pin from a grenade and preparing to throw it - is he justified in shooting the civillian? Yes, as the thrower consititutes a clear threat to the life of the soldier, his colleagues and any bystanders. Second part of the scenario is the civillian has thrown the grenade, can the soldier shoot him? Surprisingly, no! The threat (as defined by the legal team) is transfered to the grenade. Mr jihadi can be apprehended and arrested (if the soldiers survive the grenade attack), but they cannot shoot him unless he acquires a new weapon and poses a new threat.

Here's the fun bit - the soldier, in considering the first part of the scenario, does not have to confirm that the thrower is actually throwing a live and operational greande as it would be UNREASONABLE to expect him to do so. It could be a dud or a fake or just a toy, but if the soldier has reasonable grounds that there is a threat he does not have to establish the extent of that threat beyond all doubt, just beyond reasonable doubt. The chopper crew met that criteria, confirmed their conclusion with a senior offier, and then killed what they saw as a threat to fellow soldiers. That someone further up the chain got all worried about how the deluded such as yourself might perceive the action is the problem with politics, not the soldiers involved.

That those soldiers showed happiness at saving the lives of fellow soldiers should not come as a surprise to anyone. It's what they trained to do, and given a choice I would much rather see ten Mahdi gunmen and two Reuters idiots die then see even one US soldier come home in a bodybag. Is that because I think one US soldier's life is somehow worth more than an Iraqi life? No, it's because I know the US soldier was there, with the Iraqi goovernment's approval, to stop the Mahdi gunmen murdering other Iraqis. The end game plan is that the killing stops - nobody dies, everyone gets on with their lives, a much preferred option. Do I think it is regrettable that the Reuters crew got killed too? Yes, but that was their fault, not that of the chopper crews, and any court of US civil or military court of law will probably agree. Whilst you get all upset about the crew laughing at a Hummer driving over a body, that in itself is not a crime. It is also not a crime to celebrate killing the people shooting, mortaring and blowingup your friends and fellow soldiers.

In short, welcome to the real World.

RE: War is terror

Wow! Poor Joe has his pants so tight he's way beyond just knots! Somehow we jumped from Apache crews gunning down a group of armed men to nuke war and "mass slaughter"? Try a little perspective! More people are killed on the US highways in the average day than got killed in that Appache attack.

First off, there was no "mass slaughter". In terms of war combat casualties, twelve men is less than one APC load. Less than hslf a regular platoon, and a drop in the ocean compared to the casualties the Iraqi Army sustained in 1991. It is far less than the number of civillians killed in many bombings happening in Iraq, especially the ones targetting the markets. Whilst that may sound a bit heartless, the American action of the day - fully-supported by the Iraqi government - was to stop the armed militias of all sects so that the ordinary people could get on with their lives. The result was a downturn in Iraqi violence that would not have occured if the US had just pulled out and left the Irqais to slaughter each other. The fact that two journalists got themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time isn't news of mass slaughter, just inexperience and stupidity on their part.

A few years ago I watched a TV show on war journos (sorry, can't remember the title, I think it was an ITV production though). It showed how young and inexperienced journos - especially stringers with no real training in either risk assessment or military practices - could wind up dead in a very short time. There was one bit of the show going on about the start of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and a Serb tank battalion was expected to break out of its barracks in Croatia if Croatia decalred independence. It compared the experienced journos, who set up on a hill overlooking the base and filmed from safety, with the inexperienced stringers. The stringers crowded the base gate, got in the way, and some got shot and some got ran over.

Even experienced journos sometimes get it wrong. The same program had an experienced journo talking about filming a fire and explosion at an army base somewhere in Africa - they were sited almost a mile away when a piece of shrapnel took his cameraman's arm off! War in any form is unpredictable but there are some things it is obviously very stupid to do. The Reuters journos showed an amazing level of stupidity.

Let's list all the stupid things they did which any sane person would hesitate to do; going into an area the US had announced they were going to be mounting an operation in (the Allies wanted to keep civillians off the streets); not wearing anything to show they were journos rather than militiamen; mixing with armed men that would be the target of US forces (let's just pretend that neither jouno thought the militiamen concerned had any nasty intent towards the US troops); mingling with those armed men as they moved towards US ground troops, whilst Apache gunships circled overhead (at 800m an Apache is still very visible and can be heard quite clearly); and fianlly, pointing a camera at US troops that were under fire, furtively from half round a corner, rather than choosing a vantage point well back from the action (after all, he had a whopping big telephoto lens on that camera, he could have taken shots from half a mile away, not right up close to the action. The list is an obvious indicator of inexperience mixed with poor judgement to the point of downright stupidity. Hindsight or not, ask yourself if you would have done even half that list without knowing you were putting your life at serious risk. If you heard on the radio that someone had wandered into highway traffic and been killed I'm sure your first thought wouldn't be that the idiot concerned was completely blame free.

All in all, you posted a load of moralistic bunk. War in any form, whether between two uniformed armies or between a superpower and self-proclaimed "freedom fighters", is not going to be nice. People will be killed or maimed and usually in very painful and horrific ways. Accidents wil happen and innocents (and the stupid) will be killed, sometimes simply due to the limitations of the technology being used. Maybe you should quit reading McNamara (who never went to war, just did statistical analysis on the B-29 effort) and go read some basic history, you seem to have missed the bit about the realities of war.

RE: Umm ..

"....That's kind of bending the numbers to fit your world view isn't it...." Well, as someone once said, "there's lies, damn lies, and statistics". Everyone cherrypicks data to back up their arguments, but I didn't need to cherrypick, I just used the one undisputed fact on average server unit value. But are you disagreeing that hp sold their Integrity servers on average for a higher unit price than IBM sold pSeries? Please do, just for a laugh. No? Well, on with driving a bus through the holes in your argument then.

The key fact is that the average server unit sold by hp was approximately 38% more than the average IBM pSeries unit price. I'll pause here whilst you to digest and try mentally to refute that statement. You may want the help of an adult with the calculations. Right, ready for the conclusion?

That 38% indicates the average hp Integrity box sold was indeed a larger beast than IBM's average pSeries sale as both companies offer competitive prices and discount heavily to match each other. I'm sure even someone as obtuse as yourself would not contend that hp would have won deals putting a 38% more expensive solution up against an IBM offer, so it is reasonable to suspect that when they went head-to-head the prices were comparable. That also implies that - since larger boxes usually go into more demanding roles - hp was winning more of the high-end deals (larger boxes go to more demanding roles). Following that logic, it is possible to see that customers prefer hp Integrity (and therefore hp-ux) to IBM pSeries (and AIX) for their high-end requirements. I bet you're wriggling in your seat whilst not trying to admit to that conclusion! Whilst you're busy writhing, let's get to the fun bit - show me the money!

Those high-end deals usually go out with the most expensive support options, more services and lead to more of the same level of margin on opportunities in associated areas such as storage, management software, consultancy services, backup and DR - what is known as "pull-through". It therfore follows quite logically that, even though IBM and Sun sold more low-end kit, hp made much more margin on each server (big iron has higher margins than the low-end), and then made much, much more margin through the pull-through sales. As a rule of thumb, when budgetting for mission critical solutions, we assume the life-time costs of a solution (including planning, upgrades, support, decommissioning and/or re-deployment to other roles), regardless of vendor, will be about five times the original purchase price, and most of that money will go to the hardware vendor. So that means hp not only probably made much more margin than IBM on each server, they also made more on pull-through and will make more during the lifetime of those servers. So your argument that IBM made massively more money than hp simply because IBM sold more units overall is likely to be very wrong due to IBM not making as much money on each server sold, either through margin at the time of purchase or pull-through during its lifetime. This is the prime reason Sun went steeply into decline whilst still shifting a high number of (low-end) units.

"....You know you can sex this up as much as you like, but Itanium is not delivering what was promised for HP any more...." OK, so how is delivering high-end servers that customers prefer to buy over what IBM is offering, for mission critical roles (that's the high-end), "not delivering"? That implies that, as IBM is losing those high-end deals to hp Integrity as the reasoning above shows, then IBM is "delivering" even less! Your argument, not mine, no sexing up required.

OK, so no cherrypicking yet, just logical argument to refute your suggestion. If you'd like some cherrypicking, I can go over how Power6 was supposed to be in for 2006 (so, how late?), or point to a whole number of other slippages in IBM product deliveries. As said before, trolls in glass houses.....

"....If we have to wait another 3 years for Poulson to take Itanium to 8 cores, well what's the bloody point. It will be irrelevant by then....." Strangely enough (well, strangely for those like you that can't see for their blinkers), hp Integrity has won that high-end despite the Itanium delays and despite the latest versions only being dual-core to Power's four-core offerings. Which does imply that Tukzilla, as it offers more than the current Itanium offerings, is not only rellevant but will continue the hp trend for beating IBM in the high-end. And therefore that Poulsen will also, even if it does not arrive for three years, and even if IBM has shrunk it's dated design to squeeze sixteen cores onto a single die. That's if Power survives the x64 onslaught to reach another generation.

/SP&L @ the bus-sized holes in your argument.