IBM JS22 Power6 blades not the performance you think
Thursday Nov 08, 2007
Why do I attack IBM alot, it is not because they are a competitor (I don't attack all competitors), it is because IBM continues to pull such funny games to confuse the marketplace.
Here is a prime example of an un-fair/stilted comparisons from IBM press release:
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Calculations show that one rack of IBM's new POWER6 processor-based blades is so powerful when virtualized that it can replace 23 non-virtualized racks of Sun's latest V490 servers, potentially saving more than $200,000 per year in energy costs alone. (3)
Why didn't IBM compare against the Sun Blade T6320 (UltraSPARC T2) blades? IBM would have lost if they properly compared to Sun.
IBM gamed again by comparing new servers to older Sun servers. IBM claimed one rack of JS22 BladeCenter Hs to replace 180 V490s. IBM based its JS22 claim by 'pulling a a *3X* utilization rate" out of the air' when compared to the V490. The JS22 utilization was 60%, while the V490 was 20% utilized-- a report from Alinean Consulting was cited as the source for the utilization comparisons(note:I guess you can pay for anything). This was the same fake 3x difference in utilization that IBM tryed to pull in the POWER6 announcement that BM Seer shot down in "IBM rewrites history, OK footnotes to clearly show bogus calculations"
As a reminder as always with IBM read written material very carefully: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/careful_reading_shows_a_lot
Here is the IBM footnote:
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(3) The number of IBM BladeCenter JS22 servers required to replace 180 Sun Fire V490 was calculated based on SPECint_rate2006 results. The V490 SPECint_rate2006 result is for a 2.1GHz system with 4 chips and 2 cores per chip. It has a result of 78.0. The V490 result can be found at www.spec.org. It is current as of October 23, 2007. The JS22 result for the same benchmark is for a 4.0GHz system with 2 chips and 2 cores per chip. It has a result of 84.7. That result was submitted on November 6, 2007. It will also be posted on www.spec.org. The cumulative capacity of these servers is estimated to be the SPECint_rate2006 result for one server multiplied by the number of servers. A virtualization factor of 3X was applied to the JS22 virtualization scenario using utilizations derived from studies conducted by Alinean available at http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cio/optimize/opt_wp_ibm_systemp.pdf. That is the utilization rate for the non-virtualized V490 is estimated to be 20% and the utilization rate for the virtualized JS22 is estimated to be 60%. Using these assumptions, the cumulative capacity of the 56 JS22 servers at 60% is greater than the cumulative capacity of the 180 V490 servers at 20% utilization.
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Tags: blogwatch ibm performance power6 specint_rate2006
