Cheap benchmarketing trick

I already wrote about the latest benchmarketing trick of IBM in the last blog article, but this article was in german, so i repeat this in english. There was an bold statement in a recent press anouncement of IBM - "IBM Builds on Industry-Leading UNIX Portfolio With New Servers, Software":

The Power 560 can save up companies up to $840,000 and 80-percent in energy by consolidating 13 Sun Fire V490 servers on a single Power 560 server with PowerVM, as compared to consolidating the same number on four Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with dynamic system domains."

I´ve asked myself, how they get to such numbers. This number of servers couldn´t based on performance. We don´t need 4 M5000 just to substitute 13 V490. But after thinking about after reading the article in the Computerwoche i found out what´s the trick of this comparision. The trick is a cheap one ... even for IBM marketing.

You can partition an M5000 in up to 4 domains. When you just want to consolidate 13 servers, you obviously need 4 systems. This comparision doesn´t compare the compute power of the M5000 with the compute power of the p560. It compares two different virtualisation technologies. So the even the choice of 13 V490 is a really perfidious one. Twelve systems to consolidate would lead to 3 M5000, 13 systems lead to 4 because you have one domain too few. But that´s not the point: You won´t consolidate 13 V490 by using domains. You would use Solaris Containers (perhaps in conjunction with Solaris 9 Containers) for this tasks. By using this Containers you would need only one system, too. And you would need less processing power for it, as Container are a more efficient virtualisation technology in comparison to *PARS.

By the way: The answer "one system" is false for both systems. Independently from the system architecture, virtualisation technology you want at least two systems and a cluster when you consolidate 13 systems on one. Without an additional standby system you are toast in the case of a system failure or maintainance. But that´s a persistent error in every benchmarketing comparision of IBM.