Edit: These days it sounds like people are trying to outlaw them. Some links no longer work.
Originally posted March 10, 2015 on AIXchange
During a recent lunch with customers, the topic of smoking came up. Some were talking about smoking hookahs, some were talking about cigars, and some were talking about cigarettes. One of the guys had recently quit smoking. He credited the Internet, which pointed him to information about e-cigarettes.
He said e-cigarettes helped him curtail his nicotine intake, adding that the flavored e-liquids that had a more fruity taste helped him disassociate smoking with the flavor of tobacco. Then, eventually, he just stopping smoking entirely.
Someone said I should write about this, and wondered how I could possibly come up with an analogy that married smoking cessation with some technological topic. It was meant as a joke, but once I gave it some thought, I did make a connection: x86 servers. In the tech world, running Linux on commodity x86 servers is a bad habit that many of us want to break. However, we’ve been doing it for years, and we just can’t seem to stop. Sure, we’ve seen the ads telling us how our lives will be better once we quit, but some of us still can’t find a method that really works.
So has the analogy broken down for you yet? Yeah, me too. Admittedly, better analogies can be made in this case. For instance, when I think about what typically runs on Power systems, I usually imagine huge workloads that require massive amounts of uptime. These critical servers are the backbone of our businesses. Others have compared running Power systems to construction vehicles like giant earth-moving machines. Along those lines, I’ve seen IBM presentations that compared x86 servers and Power systems to bicycles and automobiles.
So would you try to move tons of dirt with a small pickup truck and a shovel? Would you put bicycle tires on a car? Then why do we insist on running the smaller and less critical workloads on slower, less powerful, less robust commodity hardware? Why aren’t we taking advantage of the machines we already have in our data centers, the same machines we trust with our most critical workloads?
We should run Power IFLs, which would enable us to fire up dark cores and memory on our larger machines at an attractive price. We should run Linux on Power with POWER8 scale-out servers with PowerVM or PowerKVM. Using these options, we could wean ourselves off commodity servers, and ultimately dispense with them entirely.
We should be educating ourselves as to why Power is the best choice. Google, Rackspace and others in the OpenPower Foundation are working on data center development around POWER8. Why aren’t you? Didn’t you see this report?
“Newly disclosed scores show Power8 beating Intel’s most powerful server processor, the 18-core Xeon E5-2699v3 (Haswell-EP), on important benchmark tests. Both processors deliver outstanding performance on the SPEC CPU benchmarks, but IBM’s huge advantages in multithreading and memory bandwidth favor Power8 when running larger test suites that more closely reflect real-world enterprise applications.
Overall, the results show that IBM offers a viable high-end alternative to Intel’s market-leading products. Equally important to Big Blue, Power8’s performance is energizing the OpenPower Foundation, an IBM-led alliance that rallies other companies to create a larger hardware and software ecosystem around the processor. IBM is offering Power8 chips to system builders in the merchant semiconductor market and is even licensing the architecture to other processor vendors. So far, the alliance has more than 80 members, including software, system, and semiconductor vendors.
Power8 is IBM’s most powerful microprocessor yet. On the merchant market, it’s available with 8, 10, or 12 CPU cores at maximum clock frequencies of 3.126GHz to 3.758GHz. Compared with its Power7+ predecessor, which is not a merchant product, Power8 offers twice the threads and L2 cache per core, up to 20% more L3 cache, a new L4 cache, up to four times the peak DRAM bandwidth, and twice the per-core SPEC CPU throughput.”
Whether it’s a force of habit or a lack of information, many customers continue to rely upon commodity hardware. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at what you can do with POWER8.