9 ms·

It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps. I would happily experiment with one of these

It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps. I would happily experiment with one of these at our HPC cluster(a small group at an University), but the idea of talking to a sales rep to even figure out what it would cost puts me off completely, ignoring the licenses for most interesting things to do with the hardware you buy. I wish t. power boxes were as easy to buy as x86 boxes. Simply configure, get an idea of a price, talk to the distributor and place an order.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I don't know if it's accessible to everyone, but IBM does have a cloud offering: https://www.ibm.com/cloud https://www.ibm.com/cloud. Their bare metal offering doesn't seem to include Power processors though: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers
guerrilla 6y ago
Do you know about Raptor Computing? [1] Some of those are affordable and all of them are configurable. Maybe they'll support POWER10 in the future. [1]. https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/
- qubex 6y ago
  Raptor Systems’s POWER9-based Talos system immediately came to mind when I was reading this. I definitely hope they’ll be bringing out a POWER10-supporting successor. The experience is now pretty perfect, even for the supposedly dicey desktop environment (provided you keep in mind that there’s a lot less hardware present than you might’ve come to expect: no integrated graphics, no in-built sound, even disk and network controllers can be a bit dicey). Their initial offerings had some notable teething problems, that I shan’t waste more pixels going into (I’ve railed against them and turned in their favour, so I shall let it rest with my partisanship and convert’s fervour). It’s certainly worth considering if you’re into exotic hardware and/or are super-security conscious AND are willing to pay some extra money beyond what you’d expect for comparable x86₆₄ commodity builds. Well worth hoping for and looking into.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Looks like about 10k USD for the POWER9 recommended config https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html
    - AlbertoGP 6y ago
      That’s true, but if you base the system on the smaller BlackBird motherboard (as I did) you can go much lower. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html You might also not need the Radeon WX7100 Pro, if a consumer level graphic card is enough there are sevaral options: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility_List/PCIe_Devices#Graphics_Cards https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility... The more you’re ready to do-it-yourself, the more you can save. You absolutely need the motherboard and IBM chip, and then you can get other things like memory, storage, graphic card, etc. used for much cheaper. Only the memory is a bit special as it has to be registered, but because of that you might be able to find good deals since it can’t be used in standard desktop computers. You can get more performance for the same price with AMD/Intel, but for those interested this platform is not that out of reach. I use it as my workstation and I’m happy with it.
      - hestefisk 6y ago
        How much is ‘much lower’? I would love to build a workstation for myself using PowerPC. Would it run AmigaOS?
        aww_dang 6y ago
        Blackbird™ Mainboard (Board Only) Order online for $1,310.99 Current Status: Backordered Not unreasonable. $500 for the 4-core processor or $800 for the 8 core. Basically what you would have paid for a decent system decades ago, without adjusting for inflation.
        AlbertoGP 6y ago
- AlbertoGP 6y ago
  There are some issues with Power10, although Raptor hasn’t revealed them yet until they clarify things with IBM: https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html?showComment=1596237086993#c968932250156647305 https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html?show...
marmaduke 6y ago
Juelich Supercomputing Center has a POWER9 system which I was able to experiment with. A lot of interesting differences from 4 way SMT, 128byte cache line size to faster main memory bandwidth and multi GPUs. In the end, it was great but not magical, so the difficulty of acquiring offsets the benefits IMO.
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  I have a 1999 IBM Multiprise 3000 and I learned that the processor has a 256-byte cache line which dropped my jaw when I read about that. Sadly, I can't get the Service Element software so I can't actually do anything with it.
DCKing 6y ago
> It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps. I've spent some time looking to see if it would be possible to spin up a POWER based VM in the cloud (just out of curiosity really). While it seems possible in theory in the IBM Cloud, it seems IBM themselves is only interested in offering this to their enterprise customers moving to the cloud, focusing it on getting people to move IBM's AIX/iSeries lock-in to the cloud. When looking at it before, I was not able to spin up a POWER VM from a regular IBM Cloud account at least. There might be a bit more interest in POWER if it wasn't so damn inaccessible but it really is. If the easiest way to get into POWER is paying thousands of dollars to a company retrofitting IBM's decidedly non-desktop hardware into desktop hardware (talking about Raptor CS), your architecture is doomed to wait for all your enterprise customers to move to amd64 commodity hardware. Maybe that is IBM's goal even, I don't know.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Doesn't GCS over Power as a platform? Likely to only deep pocketed customers but iirc they did a partnership a while back. yup -- not turn key at all -- "contact sales" but it exists: https://cloud.google.com/ibm https://cloud.google.com/ibm
- pr91 6y ago
  I think you can get Power systems on the cloud here https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual-server https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual...
  - DCKing 6y ago
    Ah this seems to be new, thanks! That's exactly the kind of response I hoped I would get. Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own. It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.
gnufx 6y ago
If you run an HPC cluster, I'd have thought you have to talk to vendors as a matter of course, but I assume there's no point yet. At least one UK vendor will sell you AC922s (POWER9), I guess as one-off, if you wanted.
- reacharavindh 6y ago
  True, I do talk to many vendors related to hardware purchase. But, it usually is about the hardware I want, after I already made up my mind about what fits into our budget and matches our need. IBM is usually not even in consideration because I cant even get a ballpark estimate of what these things practically cost (I can get some $ figures from Googling forums but it is not really of my interest). To give you an idea, I can log in into a local vendor's website, for example, https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 and quickly get an idea of what an SR650 Lenovo rack server would cost me. My configurations would obviously change the cost, which is where I talk to the vendor to get the real costs.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    That's not how IBM works or how they have ever worked. The whole idea here is to put you in touch with their sales organization who will put some effort into determining what the best way of fleecing you is.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      "Consultancy"
    - gnufx 6y ago
      But if you want a small GNU/Linux POWER system, you don't talk to IBM, surely. Ours came from OCF in the UK; they might even operate in Denmark. You won't see a price on the web site, but realistically you don't expect a list price from Dell for your x86 server systems -- at least in my experience. If you talk to them nicely, they may give you an evaluation unit. We once paid £1 for a potent Interlagos system that didn't go back. I'm not saying talking to sales people is necessarily a pleasant and easy task, of course, especially as you typically need to know more about it than they do.
nix23 6y ago
Try https://www.integricloud.com/ https://www.integricloud.com/ it's the cloud of Raptor (the power workstation builder)
- iagovar 6y ago
  Top UP? ¿? Why making it so difficult to navigate? Just give resources an price. I have to invest so much effort into an infrastructure I don't even know If I'd like to have.
  - zymhan 6y ago
    Presumably this helps them plan out capacity better. Not everyone can have the extra slack that AWS has.
- DCKing 6y ago
  It's really cool they're making this, I should give this a try. This does look like it's the most accessible way of getting a POWER-based shell. This service's interface does not start out with making a great first impression though unfortunately, but if it's the only realistic option then so be it.
__d 6y ago
I worked with a financial trading firm that was interested in evaluating a POWER system. They called IBM, who arranged a meeting our our offices. From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM. We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes. The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details. Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it. It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.
- foobar1962 6y ago
  There used to be a joke that IBM sales reps don't have children because all they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.
  - xparco 6y ago
    Please, this not Reddit...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dsr_ 6y ago
  That's really amazing. Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.
ianmunoz 6y ago
If you wanted to try ppc64le, you could reach out to OSU's OSL Lab. They have Power8/9 machines and you could build your software and possibly arrange some time for PoC. https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/ https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/ There are also these https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
- gnufx 6y ago
  Also you can build for ppc64le if you are, or become, a developer for a GNU/Linux distribution. Unfortunately getting ppc64le back online for Fedora copr has no ETA, but you can develop and build for Fedora/EPEL. I can't remember whether SuSE's OBS has it. You can also run under qemu, but I don't know how solid that is, and there is at least one simulator.
  - cyphar 6y ago
    Yeah openSUSE has ppc64le builders. I think there are openSUSE ports to ppc64le, but they definitely exist because we support SLE on ppc64le. (Disclaimer: I work for SUSE.)
Shivetya 6y ago
Well in our case (Fortune 500) we have iSeries and pSeries systems built on different generations of Power. They just aren't consumer grade machines out there, or better put commodity priced machines. When your are already invested it is far safer to stay with what works for you. My downtime is measured in hours per year and all of it has been scheduled across the last seven years; that was the last time we had an unscheduled outage. You can achieve this will all types of hardware; well maybe not all types; but it is easier with some than compared to others and expectations are certainly much higher. We joke at work that we get forgotten all the time because our daily ready for business meetings; all groups reporting in; never see us mentioned except to state plans for upcoming quarterly maintenance. A pleasant state to be in
- lgl 6y ago
  > My downtime is measured in hours per year (...) This is probably a bit picky since you don't mention what those machines do, but that's not even "four nines" in the high-availability scale. I'm not sure that's something to boast about for a Fortune 500 company or any kind of praise for the IBM series. Maybe you meant hours over the last seven years?
  - jjnoakes 6y ago
    Not op but it sounded like it was scheduled downtime so perhaps it was meant as a per-system number and either redundancy kept the availability higher or the service wasn't needed when downtime was scheduled (overnight, weekends, etc)
  - znpy 6y ago
    Planned and scheduled downtime usually doesn't count against SLO/SLA. If the "hours per year" is true, they're actually achieving 100% uptime. Fucking big deal, if you ask me.
bubblethink 6y ago
Raptor sells power9 servers. You can buy one to tinker with for ~$2k. Presumably, they will sell power 10 too.
- erk__ 6y ago
  It looks like it will be a few years before they have that https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026 https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026
  - tgflynn 6y ago
    That seems a bit disappointing. It might suggest that IBM is backtracking on their openPOWER approach.
kevstev 6y ago
The time to talk to sales reps is a real problem. I was at a startup, and this was a factor in pretty much all of the software we selected. This was a financial app- we needed messaging of some sort. I called the leaders at that time, Tibco, 29West, etc. They all wanted to schedule meetings 3-5 days in the future to just talk about what we needed. My expectation is that we would have something basically working in 3-5 days. This is before we started haggling over contracts and pricing and all that. We ended up using ActiveMQ, and literally that evening I had things talking to each other. No contracts, no hassle, just downloaded and got to work. A bit more on-topic in regards to IBM though- we buy licenses from them directly, and the past few months they have sent kind of bizarre emails saying I could save money if I bought them through a third party partner. I just forwarded the mail to the finance guys, but I can't imagine why IBM would introduce a middle man into our relationship with them and how that additional layer in between could end up saving us money.
- bitexploder 6y ago
  IBM does channel sales. They don’t want to maintain a sales force. They want to maintain channel partners and VARS. They will discount you because they need your money flowing thru VARS to keep everyone happy in their ecosystem. So they need to incentivize everyone to go through their partners. So they will charge you more if you are direct to them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tgflynn 6y ago
    > They don’t want to maintain a sales force. Wow, I didn't realize their culture had changed that much. They were a sales oriented company since the days of Thomas Watson Sr.
    - bitexploder 6y ago
      Many big B2B sales orgs are all channel or heavily channel now. Just the way it is these days.
caeril 6y ago
You can buy POWER9 boxes without talking to humans. With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations. [1] https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html
- RussianCow 6y ago
  > With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations. Not for a while: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026 https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026
tgflynn 6y ago
I don't know what the plan is for POWER10 but POWER9 systems are available from other vendors than IBM. Notably this company: https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/. The systems are still quite expensive, but likely within the budget of a University research lab.
ijidak 6y ago
I've begun to think having to "contact sales" is an anti-pattern that actually hurts gross sales in the long-run. I've recently tried to engage with EventMobi, a company that supports virtual events. I'm ready to spend thousands if necessary. However: #1: There is no way to just sign up, which is off-putting. #2: Requesting a demo just put me in their funnel with canned email messages. And after over a week, I have yet to be contacted by a live human, despite sending emails. I feel companies leave a lot of money on the table by not having some sort of self-driven onboarding. Sales reps are humans. They get busy. Forget to call back, etc. I feel like there should ALWAYS be at least some sort of self-driven flow at the low end. Even if sales are required at the high-end. Otherwise, it seems, money is always being left on the table.
- behringer 6y ago
  The "low" end is often grossly unprofitable (or, frankly, aggravating) to the point of dragging down the product and the support personnel.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I don't know if it's accessible to everyone, but IBM does have a cloud offering: https://www.ibm.com/cloud https://www.ibm.com/cloud. Their bare metal offering doesn't seem to include Power processors though: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers

guerrilla 6y ago

Do you know about Raptor Computing? [1] Some of those are affordable and all of them are configurable. Maybe they'll support POWER10 in the future. [1]. https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/

qubex 6y ago
Raptor Systems’s POWER9-based Talos system immediately came to mind when I was reading this. I definitely hope they’ll be bringing out a POWER10-supporting successor. The experience is now pretty perfect, even for the supposedly dicey desktop environment (provided you keep in mind that there’s a lot less hardware present than you might’ve come to expect: no integrated graphics, no in-built sound, even disk and network controllers can be a bit dicey). Their initial offerings had some notable teething problems, that I shan’t waste more pixels going into (I’ve railed against them and turned in their favour, so I shall let it rest with my partisanship and convert’s fervour). It’s certainly worth considering if you’re into exotic hardware and/or are super-security conscious AND are willing to pay some extra money beyond what you’d expect for comparable x86₆₄ commodity builds. Well worth hoping for and looking into.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Looks like about 10k USD for the POWER9 recommended config https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html
  - AlbertoGP 6y ago
    That’s true, but if you base the system on the smaller BlackBird motherboard (as I did) you can go much lower. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html You might also not need the Radeon WX7100 Pro, if a consumer level graphic card is enough there are sevaral options: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility_List/PCIe_Devices#Graphics_Cards https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility... The more you’re ready to do-it-yourself, the more you can save. You absolutely need the motherboard and IBM chip, and then you can get other things like memory, storage, graphic card, etc. used for much cheaper. Only the memory is a bit special as it has to be registered, but because of that you might be able to find good deals since it can’t be used in standard desktop computers. You can get more performance for the same price with AMD/Intel, but for those interested this platform is not that out of reach. I use it as my workstation and I’m happy with it.
    - hestefisk 6y ago
      How much is ‘much lower’? I would love to build a workstation for myself using PowerPC. Would it run AmigaOS?
      - aww_dang 6y ago
        Blackbird™ Mainboard (Board Only) Order online for $1,310.99 Current Status: Backordered Not unreasonable. $500 for the 4-core processor or $800 for the 8 core. Basically what you would have paid for a decent system decades ago, without adjusting for inflation.
      - AlbertoGP 6y ago
AlbertoGP 6y ago
There are some issues with Power10, although Raptor hasn’t revealed them yet until they clarify things with IBM: https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html?showComment=1596237086993#c968932250156647305 https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html?show...

marmaduke 6y ago

Juelich Supercomputing Center has a POWER9 system which I was able to experiment with. A lot of interesting differences from 4 way SMT, 128byte cache line size to faster main memory bandwidth and multi GPUs. In the end, it was great but not magical, so the difficulty of acquiring offsets the benefits IMO.

cptnapalm 6y ago
I have a 1999 IBM Multiprise 3000 and I learned that the processor has a 256-byte cache line which dropped my jaw when I read about that. Sadly, I can't get the Service Element software so I can't actually do anything with it.

DCKing 6y ago

> It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps. I've spent some time looking to see if it would be possible to spin up a POWER based VM in the cloud (just out of curiosity really). While it seems possible in theory in the IBM Cloud, it seems IBM themselves is only interested in offering this to their enterprise customers moving to the cloud, focusing it on getting people to move IBM's AIX/iSeries lock-in to the cloud. When looking at it before, I was not able to spin up a POWER VM from a regular IBM Cloud account at least. There might be a bit more interest in POWER if it wasn't so damn inaccessible but it really is. If the easiest way to get into POWER is paying thousands of dollars to a company retrofitting IBM's decidedly non-desktop hardware into desktop hardware (talking about Raptor CS), your architecture is doomed to wait for all your enterprise customers to move to amd64 commodity hardware. Maybe that is IBM's goal even, I don't know.

gigatexal 6y ago
Doesn't GCS over Power as a platform? Likely to only deep pocketed customers but iirc they did a partnership a while back. yup -- not turn key at all -- "contact sales" but it exists: https://cloud.google.com/ibm https://cloud.google.com/ibm
pr91 6y ago
I think you can get Power systems on the cloud here https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual-server https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual...
- DCKing 6y ago
  Ah this seems to be new, thanks! That's exactly the kind of response I hoped I would get. Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own. It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.

gnufx 6y ago

If you run an HPC cluster, I'd have thought you have to talk to vendors as a matter of course, but I assume there's no point yet. At least one UK vendor will sell you AC922s (POWER9), I guess as one-off, if you wanted.

reacharavindh 6y ago
True, I do talk to many vendors related to hardware purchase. But, it usually is about the hardware I want, after I already made up my mind about what fits into our budget and matches our need. IBM is usually not even in consideration because I cant even get a ballpark estimate of what these things practically cost (I can get some $ figures from Googling forums but it is not really of my interest). To give you an idea, I can log in into a local vendor's website, for example, https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 and quickly get an idea of what an SR650 Lenovo rack server would cost me. My configurations would obviously change the cost, which is where I talk to the vendor to get the real costs.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  That's not how IBM works or how they have ever worked. The whole idea here is to put you in touch with their sales organization who will put some effort into determining what the best way of fleecing you is.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    "Consultancy"
  - gnufx 6y ago
    But if you want a small GNU/Linux POWER system, you don't talk to IBM, surely. Ours came from OCF in the UK; they might even operate in Denmark. You won't see a price on the web site, but realistically you don't expect a list price from Dell for your x86 server systems -- at least in my experience. If you talk to them nicely, they may give you an evaluation unit. We once paid £1 for a potent Interlagos system that didn't go back. I'm not saying talking to sales people is necessarily a pleasant and easy task, of course, especially as you typically need to know more about it than they do.

nix23 6y ago

Try https://www.integricloud.com/ https://www.integricloud.com/ it's the cloud of Raptor (the power workstation builder)

iagovar 6y ago
Top UP? ¿? Why making it so difficult to navigate? Just give resources an price. I have to invest so much effort into an infrastructure I don't even know If I'd like to have.
- zymhan 6y ago
  Presumably this helps them plan out capacity better. Not everyone can have the extra slack that AWS has.
DCKing 6y ago
It's really cool they're making this, I should give this a try. This does look like it's the most accessible way of getting a POWER-based shell. This service's interface does not start out with making a great first impression though unfortunately, but if it's the only realistic option then so be it.

__d 6y ago

I worked with a financial trading firm that was interested in evaluating a POWER system. They called IBM, who arranged a meeting our our offices. From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM. We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes. The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details. Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it. It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.

foobar1962 6y ago
There used to be a joke that IBM sales reps don't have children because all they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.
- xparco 6y ago
  Please, this not Reddit...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dsr_ 6y ago
That's really amazing. Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.

ianmunoz 6y ago

If you wanted to try ppc64le, you could reach out to OSU's OSL Lab. They have Power8/9 machines and you could build your software and possibly arrange some time for PoC. https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/ https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/ There are also these https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

gnufx 6y ago
Also you can build for ppc64le if you are, or become, a developer for a GNU/Linux distribution. Unfortunately getting ppc64le back online for Fedora copr has no ETA, but you can develop and build for Fedora/EPEL. I can't remember whether SuSE's OBS has it. You can also run under qemu, but I don't know how solid that is, and there is at least one simulator.
- cyphar 6y ago
  Yeah openSUSE has ppc64le builders. I think there are openSUSE ports to ppc64le, but they definitely exist because we support SLE on ppc64le. (Disclaimer: I work for SUSE.)

Shivetya 6y ago

Well in our case (Fortune 500) we have iSeries and pSeries systems built on different generations of Power. They just aren't consumer grade machines out there, or better put commodity priced machines. When your are already invested it is far safer to stay with what works for you. My downtime is measured in hours per year and all of it has been scheduled across the last seven years; that was the last time we had an unscheduled outage. You can achieve this will all types of hardware; well maybe not all types; but it is easier with some than compared to others and expectations are certainly much higher. We joke at work that we get forgotten all the time because our daily ready for business meetings; all groups reporting in; never see us mentioned except to state plans for upcoming quarterly maintenance. A pleasant state to be in

lgl 6y ago
> My downtime is measured in hours per year (...) This is probably a bit picky since you don't mention what those machines do, but that's not even "four nines" in the high-availability scale. I'm not sure that's something to boast about for a Fortune 500 company or any kind of praise for the IBM series. Maybe you meant hours over the last seven years?
- jjnoakes 6y ago
  Not op but it sounded like it was scheduled downtime so perhaps it was meant as a per-system number and either redundancy kept the availability higher or the service wasn't needed when downtime was scheduled (overnight, weekends, etc)
- znpy 6y ago
  Planned and scheduled downtime usually doesn't count against SLO/SLA. If the "hours per year" is true, they're actually achieving 100% uptime. Fucking big deal, if you ask me.

bubblethink 6y ago

Raptor sells power9 servers. You can buy one to tinker with for ~$2k. Presumably, they will sell power 10 too.

erk__ 6y ago
It looks like it will be a few years before they have that https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026 https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026
- tgflynn 6y ago
  That seems a bit disappointing. It might suggest that IBM is backtracking on their openPOWER approach.

kevstev 6y ago

The time to talk to sales reps is a real problem. I was at a startup, and this was a factor in pretty much all of the software we selected. This was a financial app- we needed messaging of some sort. I called the leaders at that time, Tibco, 29West, etc. They all wanted to schedule meetings 3-5 days in the future to just talk about what we needed. My expectation is that we would have something basically working in 3-5 days. This is before we started haggling over contracts and pricing and all that. We ended up using ActiveMQ, and literally that evening I had things talking to each other. No contracts, no hassle, just downloaded and got to work. A bit more on-topic in regards to IBM though- we buy licenses from them directly, and the past few months they have sent kind of bizarre emails saying I could save money if I bought them through a third party partner. I just forwarded the mail to the finance guys, but I can't imagine why IBM would introduce a middle man into our relationship with them and how that additional layer in between could end up saving us money.

bitexploder 6y ago
IBM does channel sales. They don’t want to maintain a sales force. They want to maintain channel partners and VARS. They will discount you because they need your money flowing thru VARS to keep everyone happy in their ecosystem. So they need to incentivize everyone to go through their partners. So they will charge you more if you are direct to them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tgflynn 6y ago
  > They don’t want to maintain a sales force. Wow, I didn't realize their culture had changed that much. They were a sales oriented company since the days of Thomas Watson Sr.
  - bitexploder 6y ago
    Many big B2B sales orgs are all channel or heavily channel now. Just the way it is these days.

caeril 6y ago

You can buy POWER9 boxes without talking to humans. With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations. [1] https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html

RussianCow 6y ago
> With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations. Not for a while: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026 https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026

tgflynn 6y ago

I don't know what the plan is for POWER10 but POWER9 systems are available from other vendors than IBM. Notably this company: https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/. The systems are still quite expensive, but likely within the budget of a University research lab.

ijidak 6y ago

I've begun to think having to "contact sales" is an anti-pattern that actually hurts gross sales in the long-run. I've recently tried to engage with EventMobi, a company that supports virtual events. I'm ready to spend thousands if necessary. However: #1: There is no way to just sign up, which is off-putting. #2: Requesting a demo just put me in their funnel with canned email messages. And after over a week, I have yet to be contacted by a live human, despite sending emails. I feel companies leave a lot of money on the table by not having some sort of self-driven onboarding. Sales reps are humans. They get busy. Forget to call back, etc. I feel like there should ALWAYS be at least some sort of self-driven flow at the low end. Even if sales are required at the high-end. Otherwise, it seems, money is always being left on the table.

behringer 6y ago
The "low" end is often grossly unprofitable (or, frankly, aggravating) to the point of dragging down the product and the support personnel.