6 ms·

> 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

by 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.
  - pr91 6y ago
    Completely agree. I've talked many times to some of the folks there and it seems to me the product is not for a developer or hobbyist, which is unfortunate. It is purely enterprise. Thought this will open up a parallel ecosystem for certain applications but IBM does not seem to think that.
    - DCKing 6y ago
      I just don't understand how IBM - being acutely aware of what happened to Itanium and SPARC + running a cloud platform themselves - still believes this notion of "enterprise hardware" is the way of the future. Surely IBM was/is even better entrenched in this area than HP and Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu, but come on. POWER has a lot of history in consumer accessible products even. This is just a recipe for fading into irrelevance ever more.
      - harha 6y ago
        Sounds like a problem that should be easy to find on an org chart. If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.
        techdragon 6y ago
        It’s extremely easy to find. The problem is the org chart itself. The entire way they run this stuff is not setup to handle the kinds of things we expect (and get) from every other hardware vendor or cloud provider that could reasonably be considered a competitor to them in either category.
        harha 6y ago
        Mostly, but I think you could have an org chart and let individuals and teams override it if they find good ways to reuse assets. I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started. The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in. My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.
mark-wagner 6y ago
There is also this: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/skytapinc.skytap-on-azure-main1?tab=Overview https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...

by DCKing 6y ago

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.
- pr91 6y ago
  Completely agree. I've talked many times to some of the folks there and it seems to me the product is not for a developer or hobbyist, which is unfortunate. It is purely enterprise. Thought this will open up a parallel ecosystem for certain applications but IBM does not seem to think that.
  - DCKing 6y ago
    I just don't understand how IBM - being acutely aware of what happened to Itanium and SPARC + running a cloud platform themselves - still believes this notion of "enterprise hardware" is the way of the future. Surely IBM was/is even better entrenched in this area than HP and Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu, but come on. POWER has a lot of history in consumer accessible products even. This is just a recipe for fading into irrelevance ever more.
    - harha 6y ago
      Sounds like a problem that should be easy to find on an org chart. If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.
      - techdragon 6y ago
        It’s extremely easy to find. The problem is the org chart itself. The entire way they run this stuff is not setup to handle the kinds of things we expect (and get) from every other hardware vendor or cloud provider that could reasonably be considered a competitor to them in either category.
        harha 6y ago
        Mostly, but I think you could have an org chart and let individuals and teams override it if they find good ways to reuse assets. I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started. The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in. My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.

mark-wagner 6y ago

There is also this: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/skytapinc.skytap-on-azure-main1?tab=Overview https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...