BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

IBM New world record

Thursday Oct 23, 2008

IBM New world record: MOST EXPENSIVE CORE. :) IBM continues to charge lots per core and avoid benchmarks. Here IBM will say trust me it is fast and ask for a blank check. The IBM Z10 mainframe (64-"processor" quad-core) costs $25,000,000 Dollars. No grey area here, this is the old wasteful way of spending money for computing.

IBM mainframe Pricing at: http://www.tech-news.com/publib/pl2097.html

Let's see a public demonstration of performance on the mainframe, then Sun and others will show much more cost-effective, less carbon-producing options.

...Now I'll let all of the IBM employees try to hide who they work for by anonymously postings comments under cute names all trying to look like customers with lots of money who want to buy these super expensive things in tough economic times :)

[13] Comments
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Posted at 09:44AM Oct 23, 2008 in Benchmark Issues
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Link doesn' t work

Posted by adam on October 23, 2008 at 09:59 AM PDT #

Checked it, the link for me. Don't know what to tell you.

Posted by BM Seer on October 23, 2008 at 10:18 AM PDT #

Don't forget your problems. The 4 chip $133K T5440 server costs $1.5M in oracle software? Your own SPECjAPPserver benchmark details shows you need 24 licenses of oracle EE, Oracle partitioning, Oracle WebLogic for the 32cores on the four chips. And it looks like the four chips in the T5440 only has 3X the performance of a one chip T5140.
Itanium rocks.....Rock _____

Posted by cute name on October 23, 2008 at 11:39 AM PDT #

^^ Care to produce some benchmarks cute name?

Posted by AC on October 23, 2008 at 01:21 PM PDT #

Wow...I guess UltraSparc is now officially dead
"Sun announced the End-of-life (EOL) of the Sun Fire V490, Sun Fire V890, Sun Fire E2900, Sun Fire E4900, Sun Fire E6900, Sun Fire E20K, Sun Fire E25K servers with Last Order Date of January 8, 2009"

Southeastern Asset must be making changes. Hard not to when you spend $2.1B for 20% of a $3.5B company

Posted by cute name on October 23, 2008 at 01:40 PM PDT #

Sun - New World Record => Least expensive computer COMPANY.
Sun's market capitalization is now less than Sun's cash.
This means the world thinks the company is worthless and its only value is the cash they show on the balance sheet.

Posted by worthless on October 23, 2008 at 01:52 PM PDT #

All very cute names with mean-spirited attacks, so very typical response. Yet no one addresses the extortion prices for Z10 mainframes, or even offered a defence that the IBM Power6 is also extremely expensive ($1M for 16cores!) and it gets beaten by T5440 that costs 1/8th as much.

Posted by BM Seer on October 23, 2008 at 01:55 PM PDT #

Benchmarks? Oh, I see head to head comparison customer benchmarks against SPARC all the time,
IBM wins most of these Mainframe vs SPARC shootouts (on perf and TCO). Homework done! it is not about total cost of acquisition but total cost of ownership.

Posted by Mini Me on October 23, 2008 at 04:21 PM PDT #

Considering most mainframe shops take siloing to absurd levels. I've never seen an E25k require at least 3 separate groups (network -- on the mainframe -- not maintaining any switches or routers, software installation/removal, storage) just to maintain the system. I've yet to find someone who's worked in mainframe shops that suggest that isn't the norm.

Considering the extreme premiums that are charged for mainframe software (makes the premiums Veritas charges for Foundation suite on larger boxes look miniscule), I'd really like to see some concrete numbers for the mainframe TCO.

Everything I've seen suggests the opposite.

Posted by Jason on October 23, 2008 at 06:55 PM PDT #

In Sun we've seen customer benchmarks that show a full up M9000 is up to 2x faster than the largest Z10 mainframe. Sorry customer benchmarks so we can't disclose them (typical any time a customer goes to all of the vendors to have them run their own workload).

IBM doesn't show mainframe benchmarks in public, why? Maybe to avoid letting this kind of information see the light of day.

The mainframe costs don't stop here. IBM actually charges the customer for the proprietary OS. z/VM is around $22K per CPU (less for smaller systems), Let's see if I buy a Mac laptop or a Solaris box the OS is free. Even Linux licenses on the mainframe also costs $15K to $18K per CPU on top of the z/OS costs.

How do they maintain all of these high prices on the mainframe? I've heard others use the term "Single-vendor monopoly economics." You end up stuck and paying.

Posted by BM Seer on October 24, 2008 at 08:58 AM PDT #

more 'convenient' non-disclosable data ! hmm

Posted by Alex on October 24, 2008 at 01:04 PM PDT #

Solaris is free. Yes, because its rubbish.

Posted by Alex on October 24, 2008 at 02:18 PM PDT #

if solaris is rubbish, then how come aix is copying all the features of solaris?

Posted by tesseract on October 29, 2008 at 05:22 PM PDT #

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