Comment by classichasclass

7 years ago

I'm of two minds to this. I have a personal POWER6 running AIX and it handles my main hosting and mail. It's a great box and I love the hardware, but the IBM salesdroids would never talk to me (I do all my business through a VAR), and the CUoD nonsense and having to use a whole separate HMC to manage the single LPAR is obnoxious.

On the other hand, I absolutely love my Talos II. It's not an IBM machine, but it's engineered by them; the POWER9 is IBM, a lot of the OpenPOWER and PowerNV stuff is still as IBM designed it, and IBM contributes hardware support.

So I understand this feeling when dealing with IBM as a vendor. They suck. But I think IBM hardware is solid and their R&D is top-notch, and I'd buy IBM again (just not from them).

3 comments

classichasclass

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avip  7 years ago

TLAs I identify:

  - AIX
  - IBM
  - R&D

To be interpreted:

  - POWER*
  - VAR
  - CUoD
  - HMC
  - LPAR
  - OpenPOWER

Conclusion: I'm not a sysadmin.

  • detaro  7 years ago

    To be fair, a bunch of the latter ones are fairly specific. roughly:

    POWERx: IBMs CPU architecture

    VAR - value added reseller: if you're to small to talk to an enterprise vendor directly, or want a mix of stuff, you buy from them. (the "value added" bit is that ideally they sell you setup or other services in combination)

    CUoD - Capacity Upgrade on Demand: IBM will sell you a server with more CPUs and memory than you paid for. If you then need more, you can buy a license key to temporarily or permanently turn on the extra hardware that's already in your server

    HMC - Hardware Management Console: Terminal/interface you use to configure the server and the firmware.

    LPAR - Logical PARtition: POWER systems have a hypervisor at the firmware (and to a degree hardware) level. the "virtual machines" you create on it are called LPARs.

    OpenPOWER: IBMs effort to make POWER CPUs and surrounding hard- and software more open (partially sharing designs with partners, partially open sourcing)

    • avip  7 years ago

      Thanks! I was half joking, but that was really interesting and to the point.