5 ms·

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.

by douglasfshearer 9y ago

tengbretson 9y ago
And yet there are still people out there buying IBM and somehow not getting fired for it.
- abakker 9y ago
  Do you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?
  - dijit 9y ago
    Systems Engineer here; Absolutely. Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc; The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run: A) Windows B) Full Disk Encryption TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.
    - gigatexal 9y ago
      So, um, ... what happened to those now "useless" servers. Wondering for a friend ;-)
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  Available software constraints choices in many of those cases. Put two choices in front of an application team exec: rewrite and port an application from POWER/AIX, POWER/System i, POWER/System z for $X million, with all the attending risks that entails. Or spend same $X million on new IBM hardware, and get more capacity, performance, etc., while the system administrators/system programmers update the underlying OS, with lower magnitude of risks and impacts, and if the sysadmins screw up, that's another department, not yours, anyways. Even if porting is a one-time charge, and saves Y * $X million in N years (where N usually <5). The choice to avoid risk is easy. This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered. If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.
  - sigzero 9y ago
    Port away from? We moved everything TO POWER/AIX.
    - filereaper 9y ago
      If its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.
      - gigatexal 9y ago
        Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.
        filereaper 9y ago
        I don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.
        gigatexal 9y ago
        The hardware is where the magic is not the software.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        To complement siblings answer, there are several types of failures where PC hardware will just crash and burn, while POWER will just work as usual.
    - yourapostasy 9y ago
      Yep, I've seen that, too. There are some use cases where IBM still excels. There is a popular perception that IBM is a has-been dinosaur, especially with the System z (mainframe) stuff, but I still haven't heard that Visa International has moved even one of their three world-wide super data centers off of that platform. The Linux world could avoid reinventing a lot of wheels in the future looking to the lessons IBM has publicly published about in the mainframe world. Even POWER/AIX is scoffed at in many Linux circles. I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use. [1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-liveupdate-trs/index.html https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...
- rodgerd 9y ago
  Sometimes IBM are better than the alternative. Hard to believe in the HN bubble, I know, but there you are. (The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.

tengbretson 9y ago

And yet there are still people out there buying IBM and somehow not getting fired for it.

abakker 9y ago
Do you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?
- dijit 9y ago
  Systems Engineer here; Absolutely. Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc; The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run: A) Windows B) Full Disk Encryption TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.
  - gigatexal 9y ago
    So, um, ... what happened to those now "useless" servers. Wondering for a friend ;-)
yourapostasy 9y ago
Available software constraints choices in many of those cases. Put two choices in front of an application team exec: rewrite and port an application from POWER/AIX, POWER/System i, POWER/System z for $X million, with all the attending risks that entails. Or spend same $X million on new IBM hardware, and get more capacity, performance, etc., while the system administrators/system programmers update the underlying OS, with lower magnitude of risks and impacts, and if the sysadmins screw up, that's another department, not yours, anyways. Even if porting is a one-time charge, and saves Y * $X million in N years (where N usually <5). The choice to avoid risk is easy. This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered. If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.
- sigzero 9y ago
  Port away from? We moved everything TO POWER/AIX.
  - filereaper 9y ago
    If its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.
    - gigatexal 9y ago
      Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.
      - filereaper 9y ago
        I don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.
        gigatexal 9y ago
        The hardware is where the magic is not the software.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        To complement siblings answer, there are several types of failures where PC hardware will just crash and burn, while POWER will just work as usual.
  - yourapostasy 9y ago
    Yep, I've seen that, too. There are some use cases where IBM still excels. There is a popular perception that IBM is a has-been dinosaur, especially with the System z (mainframe) stuff, but I still haven't heard that Visa International has moved even one of their three world-wide super data centers off of that platform. The Linux world could avoid reinventing a lot of wheels in the future looking to the lessons IBM has publicly published about in the mainframe world. Even POWER/AIX is scoffed at in many Linux circles. I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use. [1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-liveupdate-trs/index.html https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...
rodgerd 9y ago
Sometimes IBM are better than the alternative. Hard to believe in the HN bubble, I know, but there you are. (The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)