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    IBM Introduces the Commodity Power Server

    News
    itworld ibm linux on power commodity servers power risc power8 mini computing linux servers
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    • scottalanmillerS
      scottalanmiller @coliver
      last edited by

      @coliver said:

      That makes sense. They will probably have to be tweaked to take advantage of some of Power's components though? Or does the underlying language handle all of that?

      What do you mean?

      coliverC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • coliverC
        coliver @scottalanmiller
        last edited by

        @scottalanmiller said:

        @coliver said:

        That makes sense. They will probably have to be tweaked to take advantage of some of Power's components though? Or does the underlying language handle all of that?

        What do you mean?

        Language was the wrong choice of words, the article answered my question... probably should read before I comment :).

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        • PSX_DefectorP
          PSX_Defector @scottalanmiller
          last edited by

          @scottalanmiller said:

          Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu have already ported their entire ecosystems. How many things are actually written just for AMD64 architecture anyway?

          Knew about SuSE and kind of about Ubuntu, but didn't know RedHat had a PPC port. Though most who do use that specific kernel it would be using Yellow Dog most of the time. PPC was kind of the forgotten platform for Linux, right before SPARC and somewhere around Alpha. Even IA64 has more support around it than PPC. It might have been the whole IBM stuff. PPC was limited to AIX and OS/400 for the longest time. With a commodity server now, at a reasonable price, there should be more adoption of it.

          Only items that would be x86 only would be precompiled binaries. If there is source, and gcc supports the call, then it should compile on any version. There would be x86 type calls only, especially with C++ and such, but it should work.

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          • scottalanmillerS
            scottalanmiller
            last edited by

            For quite some time Red Hat has been the darling on Power. They've kept a port for over a decade now, I think. Suse was always tier 1 but RH was right behind them after the first year or so. IBM has been making sure at least one of the two leaders was continuously available on everything from the little rack mount Power boxes up to their mainframes since around 2001.

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            • StrongBadS
              StrongBad
              last edited by

              I wonder if IBM will approach this from a hosting perspective as well. Why not build a cloud platform on top of this?

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              • scottalanmillerS
                scottalanmiller
                last edited by

                No reason that that would not work. Get KVM or Xen working on Power, port OpenStack and away you go.

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                • Reid CooperR
                  Reid Cooper
                  last edited by

                  I would love to see Power as a hosted product. I would be happy to try using Power for projects, but I mostly look to hosted cloud products for computing resources these days when dealing with the Intel world, why would I move back to physical to work with Power? They have cleared on hurtle but they have another big one to get over before they are on the same playing field, I think.

                  PSX_DefectorP 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • PSX_DefectorP
                    PSX_Defector @Reid Cooper
                    last edited by

                    @Reid-Cooper said:

                    I would be happy to try using Power for projects, but I mostly look to hosted cloud products for computing resources these days when dealing with the Intel world, why would I move back to physical to work with Power?

                    Because PPC has always been available to "virtualize".

                    I work with iSeries boxes so this will be AS/400 specific, but they have a function called LPAR. If you need separate instances, all you have to do is partition the system and you have a "new" machine ready to go. This has existed in the AS/400 line for a long time, even before PPC, introduced in V4R4 back in 1998.

                    Yeah, it's not "virutalized" like you expect x86 to be, but it's effectively the same.

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                    • Reid CooperR
                      Reid Cooper
                      last edited by

                      I'm familiar with LPARs, but will the LPAR system be available to us on the LC servers?

                      PSX_DefectorP 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • PSX_DefectorP
                        PSX_Defector @Reid Cooper
                        last edited by

                        AFAIK, that's part of the whole architecture. Kind of hard to change course since these features existed within PPC well before OpenPOWER existed.

                        Can't seem to find the Redbook on it from IBM though, although keep in mind Rackspace is selling OpenPOWER stuff. I doubt they are buying hundreds of these things and letting the customer at it.

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                        • Reid CooperR
                          Reid Cooper
                          last edited by

                          Good point. I don't particularly doubt that it is there, just don't want to count unhatched chickens, you know? HP used to sell Proliants with the built in virtualization disabled via BIOS. Not that IBM would pull that, but without knowing that the feature is there for sure, it's something to look into.

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