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There was a small company called Plattform Solution. This company developed a Mainframe clone based on Itanium procs. And big IBM sued the small PSI. This could be a story of hate, legal dodges and the game of sueing and counter sueing. But the story ended differently: The big IBM simply simply swallowd the small PSI as reported by Computerworld for example.

Well ... where leave this the mainframe market. IBM took it´s nearest competito out of the game. This can lead to two developments in the future. You might think (and some industry analysts indeed do) that IBM will use the technology of PSI to build a new class of cheap mainframes. My personal opinion to that: Dream on and pigs might fly. IBM would canibalize it´s high margin mainframe business with such an offer and it needs the high margins to refinance the further development of the mainframe technology for a shrinking group of customers. And additionally: I heard on several occasions, that IBM uses laptops internally with mainframe emulation for test purposes. It would be easy for the large IBM to productize this emulation if they really want to do that. They don´t need to buy a company to do that (and more logical targets would be their own pSeries or xSeries and not an a somewhat strange Itanium server)

The more probable possibility is in my opinon a different one: They simply want to take out a competitor to protect their market share. And this would leave this acqusition as an interesting target for antitrust inquiries. But thats only my 2 cents, time will tell.

I really think this is benchmarketing at full throttle. IBM published an new TPC-C record for non-clustered systems. Okay, TPC-C is meaningless, but it´s fun to read the disclosures. Before i start: I hope you remeber the saying "TPC-C is a function about the number of disks, not a benchmark of the complete system".

A configuration with IBM Power 595 Server Model 9119-FHA yielded a TPC-C throughput of 6,085,166 transactions. That´s impressive. Even more impressive: This benchmarketing configuration used the small number of 10.992 disks with 73.4 GB capacity (The second on the list, an HP Superdome, reached 4,092,799 with just 6000 disks ). Ten thousand disks ... sounds like a real-world configuration

PS: It´s a disclosure with an availability 6 month in the future again, the maximum amount of time allowed under the rules of the TPC.

Many intelligent people work at IBM. I know some of them. So i have some difficulties to understand such blog postings like this one. Mr. Pearson touts in "Yes, Jon, there is a mainframe that can help replace 1500 x86 servers" the myth again, that you can consolidate 1500 x86 servers on one big mainframe. In a strange way, he is correct. You can consolidate this number of servers. But only in a certain corner case: Almost all of this servers has to run almost without any load. Mr Pearson writes:

125 Production machines running 70 percent busy
125 Backup machines running idle ready for active failover in case a production machine fails
1250 machines for test, development and quality assurance, running at 5 percent average utilization

What does this mean? Well ... To get to this 10% myth you add 125 idle machines and 1250 almost idle myth. I think it's save to assume that consolidating servers without load is like fishing in a barrel.

The next joke of this blog entry is how they compare to a solution with x86 servers. At first they do the utilisation game again. This time they assume, that every x86 system is only loaded at 10%. (I assume this is the reason for assuming this large amount of test systems). By the way: Obviously they use Sun equipment for such tasks, not Dell, HP or something like that ... don't know why they have this preference

Besides all this nonsense in this blog entry: Nobody would buy a multi-million mainframe for such a task. You would buy some large x86 systems like the X4450, X4440 or X4600 with up to 32 x86 cores. To consolidate your test servers you would use VMware, Xen, xVM, Container or something like that. Let's play IBM's game for a second. Let's assume we can rise the load to 90% by using xVM Server. So we can consolidate 9 systems on a two core two sockets machine. We use a system with twice the sockets and twice the cores. So we would be able to consolidate 36 system on a 2 rack unit system.

You would need 41 of this systems for the idle systems. Now let's assume you need the power of 105 (150 systems at 70%) systems equivalent to the X2200M2 for the production systems. Divide this by 4 as we use more powerful systems. Makes 25 systems. Add 5 spare systems to move services in case of the failure of a single system. You need a total of 71 X4440 systems to consolidate the load. List price for a quadcore quad socket system is $ 13,445.00 at the moment. This leads to a price of roundabout 954595$. For this price you get 80 TB of local boot storage, 4.4 TB main memory with 1136 cores of computing power. I'm not sure about the exact pricing of a 64-way z10 mainframe but i'm sure that you can't buy it for a million list price.

I want to quote an article from the ITjungle:

IBM did not, as you might imagine, announce list prices for these new z10 EC boxes, but Karl Freund, vice president of marketing for the System z line (who used to have the same job in the System p line) said that the entry configuration of the z10 EC starts at around $1 million, not including software; he didn't tell me I was crazy when I suggested that a fully loaded z10 EC with 64 cores activated for processing, lots of main memory, and other required hardware would cost tens of millions of dollars. Even at $1,000 per MIPS, it works out to $30 million, and at $1,500 per MIPS, that's $45 million.

$30 million hardware investment to substitute $1 million worth of x86 servers. What a bargain ....

Well, however you turn it ... consolidating Unix workloads on mainframes stays a bad decision. And i didn't even talked about ISV support, software availability, know-how (you know, there are not that much of non-retired mainframe specialists)

By the way: There is another interesting gem in the blog entry:

While a 1-way z10 EC can handle 920 MIPS, the 64-way can only handle 30,657 MIPS. The 29,477 MIPS needed for the Sun x2100 workload can be handled by a 61-way, giving you three extra processors to handle unexpected peaks in workload.

Somewhere on the road from 1 to 64 ways the system looses half of it's performance amount of performance. When you assume perfect scaling you would expect 58880 MIPS. But you get only 52% of it and that's far from a reasonable scaling. For each way you spend you get a half way back. You buy 64 ways and get only 32 ways back. Just for comparision: Using 64 cores in a M8000 gives you the performance of 55 cores (based on a conservative internal benchmark with real applications, not SPECint_rate or something easy like that)

IBM understands the art of nonsensical comparision to perfection. IBM Germany tries to convince the customers, that Sun is extremly expensive. Okay, at first: They use the oldest trick in their portfolio again. Comparing a new system with an old system. The p570 is a system introduced last year. The UltraSPARC IV+ with 1.8 GHz was introduced in August 2006. We´ve introduced the UltraSPARC T2 and the SPARC64-based system since.

Okay, but let´s play the game of IBM. Just for fun ...

I´ve wrote on some occasions in the past that the marketing of IBM is really innovative (vicious voices tend to say, it´s their last core competency). But they seem to have a lack of ideas recently.

To understand the copycat moniker i should give you some upfront informations: Perhaps you know the Sun Try&Buy program. You can do such a T&B for a multitude of systems. You can get a system for 60 days to test it. You buy it, when it matches your requirements, but you can send it back, when you don´t want to keep it (whatever your reason is). No strings attached. You just have to send it back in a proper condition. Another marketing program was the "Buy a UltraSPARC T1 server, we pay the electric power for the system for the first year". We have this T&B for years now and the electric power promo is a really old one....

Well IBM Germany announced a new program today: Consolidate at least two servers from another vendor, and you get a p520 for a test for ... wait ... 60 days. And in a different offering they pay your electricity bill for the new server for ..... surprise, surprise ... one year in case of a server consolidation:

Zusätzlich übernimmt IBM im Rahmen eines neuen Energieeffizienzangebots bei einer Serverkonsolidierung auf System p mit POWER-Prozessor ein Jahr lang die Energiekosten für den Betrieb des neuen Servers. Das Angebot ist bis zum 20. Juni 2008 gültig.

But there are some strings. For example you have to write a test report and IBM is allowed to publish it:

Testbericht: Jeder Teilnehmer erklärt sich bereit, innerhalb von vier Wochen nach Ende des Testzeitraums einen selbst erstellten Testbericht an IBM zu liefern. IBM ist berechtigt den Testbericht zu veröffentlichen.

Furthermore there is only one type of system in the programm: Just the p520 is covered by this program.

That´s such a cheap copycat .... IBM marketing used to be more innovative in the past ...

IBM published a new Redbook about the deployment of one of their products on Solaris 10: IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1 on the Solaris 10 Operating System. The redbook is a joint effort of IBM and Sun employees. It´s an excellent whitepaper for all people thinking about the deployment of Solaris 10 for their appservers. This whitepaper goes way beyond a simple basic installation and tuning guide. It includes the usage of Zones, Resource Management, SMF, Least Privileges. Even the Solaris 8 Migration Assisant (aka Solaris 8 Zones in Solaris 10) is covered as a way to migrate old websphere installations until transitioned to newer WS versions.

IBM announced a new mainframe ... the z10. And they did it again, they play with the utilisation trick. But this time , they strech this even farther. Instead of the 30% utilisation assumed for system competing with their pSeries, they assume 10% utilisation for systems for consolidation on a zSeries. Jeff Savit wrote a nice article about this: The Ten Percent Solution.

There is only one thing you can consolidate on a z10 mainframe in a resonable manner: z9 mainframes.

IBM announced new Power6 based systems today. The p520 Express and the p550 Express. This announcement is somewhat hidden in the PowerVM announcement.Well, now legions of IBM sales reps will go to customers and tell them: "We have Power6 in smaller systems. Not only in p570". But you have to take this comment with a really large amount of salt.

When you look into the data sheets you find some interesting facts. You won´t get 4.7 Ghz p6 with the new systems. The p520 is a 4.2 Ghz only system and the p550 is only available with 3.5 or 4.2 Ghz. So still no mass-rollout of the 4.7 GHz p6 silicon. IBM must still have yield problems with the high-end version.

More interesting is the fact, that the p520 doesn´t have the 32 MB L3 Cache of the larger boxes. I wrote about the effect of having less cache on the Power6 chip some weeks ago when the new blade was announced. Like with the blade: You get the p6 proc but not the p6 performance.

After all this offerings from Oracle, Sun and so on, IBM had something to do about virtualisation: And IBM does what they do everytime in this case ... bundling old products into something new. For example their new PowerVM offering. It´s just the virtualisation of the Power processors bundled with some code from Transitive to execute x86 code on a Power CPU. I´m not really convinced about such a bundle. To do virtualisation for x86 on Power looks like a marketing stunt for me. Why should i buy an expensive Power system to virtualize Linux x86 systems? Even at 2000$ socket for VMware it´s vastly cheaper to buy a x86 server in the first place. And this doesn´t take support from ISV into consideration. But at the end: You can say everything about IBM, but you can´t say that they have a bad marketing department.

PS: By the way ... LDOMS or Containers on Solaris goes for $0 ... beat this, IBM

Interesting development - IBM and NTAP were downgraded to "neutral" by UBS:

International Business Machines (IBM) and Network Appliance (NTAP) were both downgraded to neutral from buy at UBS, on concerns over slowing spending in 2008.

Siebel is one of the epidemic applications in the enterprise. Look in any company of a certain size and you find Siebel or a similar application. Customer Relationship Management was one of the big hype topics a few years ago. Thus benchmarks for this application are really important for server vendors.

When you dig around in the benchmark whitepapers for Siebel, you will find a really interesting gem of information: You can outperform three IBM p570 p6 4,7 GHz with two Sun Sparc Enterprise T5120 and two T5220.

According to the the benchmarking document from Oracle and IBM a configuration consisting out of one 8-proc p570, one 4-proc p570 and one 2-proc p570 was benchmarked. This configuration was able to serve 7000 users with a rate of 106,157 business transactions per hour. A few days ago Oracle certified the benchmark for our UltraSPARC T2 base servers. According to this document, a configuration consisting out of 4 systems with one UltraSPARC T2 each was able to serve 10000 users with a rate of 142,061 business transactions per hour.

I want to add some perspective to this result: The result is especially interesting, as the IBM Power6 based configuration is vastly more expensive than the one based on UltraSPARC T2. The capabilties of the T2 are really amazing.

Before starting to rave to much about Mainframe Solaris, we should ask "Cui bono?". With all respect to the technical merits, i have my problems with this technology and with answering this question.. I´m still searching for the business case for this OS. In my personal opinion, it has only one purpose: Helping IBM´s sales reps to sell mainframes as they can say "Even Solaris runs on our new iteration of our zDinosaur". Yet another technology to help IBM with their nuclear submarine problem

But: I have no idea, why even the most underinformed CIO should do this. When i take the experiences with Mainframe Linux into consideration, the price/performance will be horrible. Why should you use a mainframe for a considerable amount of money with a performance on par with a small x86 server? This doesn´t look as a wise choice.

The next point: Software support ... there is not really a ISV support for Linux on mainframe besides of IBM, and i don´t really think that this will be much different with Mainframe Opensolaris. This Opensolaris isn´t a binary compatible implementation. You have to recompile your stuff, you have to requalify it, you have to redeploy it on a completly different platform.

As the Mainframe Solaris is still a Solaris, you have to keep the skills in your company. You have to backup it from the inside to make an consistent backup from a running system. Sorry, no savings here.

By the way, IBM´s zSeries in entirety leaves me with some questions: There isn´t a single widely accepted benchmark available for Mainframe Linux, and when zSeries is such a great consoldiation plattform, why isn´t there an AIX for this plattform? Such a move would be obvious. And i would like some more data about those mainframe consolidation projects: Consolidation hundreds of small old servers with light load, is a tedious job, but not an archievement. How many of them were development or testing servers ... and so on. Data you need for decision making.

I don´t see any advantage in doing such a consolidation project: Consolidation by virtualisation? Well, the best way to consolidate old Sun SPARC servers (maybe a couple of E250) ist to buy a new Sun SPARC server (perhaps a T5220 or a V490 depending of the task) . You have Containers, you have LDOMs von CMT-Systems to. You can use the same binary, and when your ISV doesn´t exist anymore, you can use the Solaris 8 Migration Assistant for example. Much easier than porting, less risk and vastly cheaper.

At the end: Even when i take out of consideration, that this technology months to years away from beeing ready for prime time, i don´t see any viable reasons to use Solaris for Mainframes. Okay, with the exception of political ones ("The Sun SR didn´t send me coffee mugs for years" )

Okay, there is a beautiful icing on the sulfur seas in hell. You find a video of an OpenSolaris kernel boot into something similar to the single user mode on a zSeries at youtube: Part IV and Part V. The boot starts at the end of Part IV.

I thought a little bit about the TPC-H benchmark published by IBM yesterday. There is something in it, that leaves some question. The p570 is a 8 socket system. You can build it by stacking 4 two-socket boxes with some special cabling. That´s one of the points behind buying a p570. Nevertheless, the configuration of the benchmark didn´t worked that way. They had 32 of this p570 building bloacks and used this boxes as 32 distinct systems making the p570 buildingblocks to an expensive volume server. By using the capability to build bigger systems ot of those building blocks you would have 8 instead of 32 systems to manage.

The questions: What´s the reason of using such a configuration? Is there a scalability problem within the p570 giving you less return for the socket in bigger configurations ? What´s the impact to loads with higher dependencies between the partitions? I would like to see the performance numbers for a system with 32 p570 buildingblocks in 8 systems with an otherwise equal configuration.

Wow, it´s benchmarketing time at IBM again. IBM Announces DB2 and POWER6 Combo Trounces HP and Sun by 2x and 3x Respectively in New Business Intelligence Benchmark. IBM you are soooo great .... you was able to beat our TPC-H 10 TB by a factor of 3. It´s really an technological archievement in 2007 to beat a TPC-H benchmark result generated on on 29th November 2005 ... exactly 2 years ago today. Come on ... in IT 2 years are a fscking long time ....

Everytime i read a benchmark from IBM, i really looking forward to read their disclosure to see, what you can do in benchmarking, when you have nearly unlimited resources.

The configuration of IBM consists out of: 32 p6 p570 servers, each server had 32 GB of memory, resulting in 1 TB memory. Each of the systems had 96 36 Gigabyte 15k harddisks with 4 GB/s FC. A whooping amount of 3072 harddisks. A fully 10 GB enabled network.

The SF25K result was done on 1296 disk, with 10k rounds with 2 GB/s. The memory had a size of 288 GB. On a single system with a single operating system image The system used the old UltraSPARC with 1.5 GHz

Not that you can´t buy an system from Sun equivalent system from IBM. The venerable SF25k now has up to 1.15 TB per domain. And the M9000 class servers are a completly different story. But,dear IBM,when you want to make a statement of relative performance, the system should be at least somewhat similar.

So dear IBM, next time you want to showcase you system, don´t do it against a benchmark 2 years old. What´s the statement of such a press announcement: We are 3 times faster with our top of the line system with a benchmarking configuration than a 2 years old configuration. Big deal, IBM, really big deal ...