BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

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Sun's complete systems comparison versus IBM core fantasy

Friday Apr 20, 2007

Customers are seeing that IBM costs 3x more per core - that means that Sun could be half the performance per core and STILL make Sun a much better value and be a lot faster since Sun can have twice the number of cores. IBM seems to live in a core-fantasy world. So if you get confused by IBM's over-built and vastly over-priced cores, you should just go back to comparing system versus system, because that is what you buy. I don't look at the number of valves (cores) when I'm buying a car (system).

Fully-configured Sun E25K are less expensive and faster than fully-configured IBM p5 595 - included all hardware & software costs. Check out these benchmarks: http://www.sun.com/servers/sparc_benchmarks/

...and this reality posting (check pricing and calculate the per core price): http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/not_comparing_e25k_p595

IBM's tuning of benchmarks. http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ibm_making_the_simplistic_sound

In other news, Goldman Sachs downgraded IBM. http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=1&artnum=1&issue=20070418

[3] Comments

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Posted at 03:00PM Apr 20, 2007 in IBM Follies
Tags: ibm sun

Comments:

That's all well and good however the bad news is until 3rd party vendors change their pricing model core performance is relevant; almost all vendors today are still pricing per core. Surprisingly Microsoft is one of the few vendors that does a socket based pricing. More importantly this should be a call to the s/w industry to start fair pricing models. Enough of core/chip/... licensing models. I don't profess to have a solution but all I know is that the present model is broken.

Posted by Anantha on April 22, 2007 at 06:41 PM PDT #

I was trying to highlight the 'gap' between h/w and s/w world; it is true that the overall system (h/w + s/w) price as you had compared was favorable to Sun. However, I can't tell you how many times I'm with s/w vendors who just don't get it. Have you priced Informatica lately? I'm fairly confident in short order (no later than 2010) they'll be out of business or an also ran. What a bunch of blowhards when it comes to pricing.

Posted by Anantha on April 23, 2007 at 04:10 PM PDT #

reposted comment due to problems with html editing this was originally the second posting. I'm a bit confused by your comment, the pricing model shown in the 2nd link in the original posting does include software pricing per core, but because the IBM hardware per core price is soooo much more -- that in total cost analysis Sun is cheaper (and faster).

I'll agree the present software model is antiquated -- but please don't assume that even hardware systems with the same chip count or core count cost the same.

Posted by BM Seer on April 25, 2007 at 11:30 AM PDT #