Edit: The first link has been changed to a new location.
Originally posted October 6, 2009 on AIXchange
Although this is written about mainframes, I think that many of its arguments also hold water when discussing Power Systems servers.
From the article on mainframes:
“Joe Clabby, who leads the analyst firm Clabby Analytics, said the trend off mainframes and onto x86 servers running virtualization is actually a step backward.
“‘PCs are not mainframes, and VMware is nowhere near mainframes from an advanced virtualization and provisioning perspective,’ he said. ‘Mainframes are so much more advanced than VMware that it may take that customer 10 years to get what they have now in virtualization, automatic provisioning and workload management.
“Not surprisingly, mainframe kingpin IBM concurs. ‘It’s like comparing a Mini Cooper to a tractor-trailer truck. Sure, the Mini Cooper is more efficient, but if you are moving out of your house, which one is better to have? Which one will be able to carry that baby-grand piano? And how many trips would you need to do the same job with the Mini Cooper?’
” ”They’re buying into a broken model of computing known as distributed computing, where management costs are way out of control and where they’ll scale by adding more blades, racks or servers — all running at maybe 40 percent of utilization because they have to leave headroom for their application and database servers to handle peak workloads,’ Clabby said.
“‘Start adding up all the networking costs, the tons of people they need to manage the distributed environment they’re putting in place, the multiple security licenses, the business continuity measures they’ll have to put in place–they’re out of their minds if they think they’re going to save big money doing this,’ he added.”
Yes, you can run some software hypervisor and virtualize your x86 hardware. But can you combine dedicated and virtual adapters in the same partition the same way you can with Power systems servers? Is your hypervisor running at the bare metal level, or is it running Linux code? Can you run micropartitions and share CPUs?
Once you look at all of the things that you can do with PowerVM, I don’t know why you’d want to bother with anything else.