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If any management/exec thought of this filter, they are idiots. I'd imagine if they made these as accessible as x86 servers to me - a humble sysadmin, and I cou

If any management/exec thought of this filter, they are idiots. I'd imagine if they made these as accessible as x86 servers to me - a humble sysadmin, and I could prove by data that our legacy Fortran scientific application can run faster on it than the newest Intel servers (it most likely would, given SMT differences, higher memory bandwidth, wider cache lines, more efficient 7 nm process, higher clocks etc) I'd recommend to my boss to spend our annual compute budget on these boxes instead of the Intel servers because that one legacy application consumes a lot of our HPC compute capacity. My boss and I would happily pay IBM to give this critical application a boost. Too bad, IBM filtered me away.

jacquesm 6y ago
Agreed. Lots of companies have this 'call our sales department' strategy prior to giving you any information at all. That's always been a great way to lose my business, and indirectly the businesses for which we consult. But that's perfectly ok with me. If a company is not willing to list their prices up front then that's a good indication that they are not competitive. Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.
- tgflynn 6y ago
  The last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) you could configure and price at least some categories of POWER servers on IBM's website much like you can with Dell or any other x86 vendor. The big difference though was in the amount of sticker shock when you see the bottom line price.
freedomben 6y ago
Very much agree. When IBM acquired Red Hat I really hoped they were going to get serious about cloud. They still might, but at least for now me as an individual guy just can't play with their hardware. I admit I'm quite impatient and I get irritated when any amount of red tape blocks efficient allocation of my time, but I don't think (given how easy it is on other cloud platforms) it's too much to ask for if you want to be taken seriously as a public cloud offering.
hindsightbias 6y ago
There are other options (1 is offline being upgraded this week) https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/ https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/ Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.

jacquesm 6y ago

Agreed. Lots of companies have this 'call our sales department' strategy prior to giving you any information at all. That's always been a great way to lose my business, and indirectly the businesses for which we consult. But that's perfectly ok with me. If a company is not willing to list their prices up front then that's a good indication that they are not competitive. Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.

tgflynn 6y ago
The last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) you could configure and price at least some categories of POWER servers on IBM's website much like you can with Dell or any other x86 vendor. The big difference though was in the amount of sticker shock when you see the bottom line price.

freedomben 6y ago

Very much agree. When IBM acquired Red Hat I really hoped they were going to get serious about cloud. They still might, but at least for now me as an individual guy just can't play with their hardware. I admit I'm quite impatient and I get irritated when any amount of red tape blocks efficient allocation of my time, but I don't think (given how easy it is on other cloud platforms) it's too much to ask for if you want to be taken seriously as a public cloud offering.

hindsightbias 6y ago

There are other options (1 is offline being upgraded this week) https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/ https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/ Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.