It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant.
POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good.
ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible.
It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers.
This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.
It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant.
POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good.
ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible.
It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers.
This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.