6 ms·

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/p

by 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.
    - pr91 6y ago
      Beats me. Can't believe a company that was making processors for the most picky of all industries (gaming consoles) is now completely ignoring the everyday consumer. Org priorities and financial engineering it looks like.
      - tgflynn 6y ago
        They've made huge changes since those days, getting rid first of x86 laptops and desktops then servers then chip fab. None of those decisions ever seemed particularly wise to me, especially the last.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  At a guess you are not the target audience and this up front commitment is their way of filtering you out.
  - DCKing 6y ago
    Of course I'm not. My entire point is that filtering out average Janes like me is antithetical to the long-term interests of POWER, and extremely weird for a cloud platform that allows you to spin up an amd64 VM in a few seconds for a few cents. You're left with an audience that has to use POWER (either because legacy or their purchasing colleagues thought it somehow was a good idea), not an audience that actually wants to.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      It speaks volumes to me and says that IBM knows perfectly well that they are not interested in cost conscious customers but only want those for whom the IT department is a cost center and not a core strategic asset. That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect. If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.
      - DCKing 6y ago
        I understand that is how IBM thinks. I just don't like that they only think this way, as it feels like spoilt potential. IBM has all the pieces in place - they have great technology with high performance, ppc64le actually has pretty good apparent support from mainstream Linux distros, infrastructure and languages (for a non x86/arm architecture), and they have full "creative liberty" of where they focus their platform. It would be an awesome option to have for cloud infrastructure, but they keep it all to themselves. They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well. And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.
- StillBored 6y ago
  It could be your going about it a bit wrong. IBM does have trial POWER cloud instances. Or at least they did a couple years ago, as I managed to get my hands on one through the IBM developer program. OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.

by 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.
  - pr91 6y ago
    Beats me. Can't believe a company that was making processors for the most picky of all industries (gaming consoles) is now completely ignoring the everyday consumer. Org priorities and financial engineering it looks like.
    - tgflynn 6y ago
      They've made huge changes since those days, getting rid first of x86 laptops and desktops then servers then chip fab. None of those decisions ever seemed particularly wise to me, especially the last.
jacquesm 6y ago
At a guess you are not the target audience and this up front commitment is their way of filtering you out.
- DCKing 6y ago
  Of course I'm not. My entire point is that filtering out average Janes like me is antithetical to the long-term interests of POWER, and extremely weird for a cloud platform that allows you to spin up an amd64 VM in a few seconds for a few cents. You're left with an audience that has to use POWER (either because legacy or their purchasing colleagues thought it somehow was a good idea), not an audience that actually wants to.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    It speaks volumes to me and says that IBM knows perfectly well that they are not interested in cost conscious customers but only want those for whom the IT department is a cost center and not a core strategic asset. That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect. If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.
    - DCKing 6y ago
      I understand that is how IBM thinks. I just don't like that they only think this way, as it feels like spoilt potential. IBM has all the pieces in place - they have great technology with high performance, ppc64le actually has pretty good apparent support from mainstream Linux distros, infrastructure and languages (for a non x86/arm architecture), and they have full "creative liberty" of where they focus their platform. It would be an awesome option to have for cloud infrastructure, but they keep it all to themselves. They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well. And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.
StillBored 6y ago
It could be your going about it a bit wrong. IBM does have trial POWER cloud instances. Or at least they did a couple years ago, as I managed to get my hands on one through the IBM developer program. OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.