back to article Imagine a sad deflating balloon. There, that's IBM's servers, storage

IBM's Systems segment saw dismal revenues in its third quarter results, with declines in both servers and storage. Z System mainframes are benefiting from the Watson-style cognitive computing efforts and both all-flash and software-defined storage are looking up, like beacons of light in the gloom. It's worth stressing that …

  1. Ashley_Pomeroy

    Couldn't they just sell the entire rest of the business to Lenovo?

    But keep the punch card business just in case punch cards come back into fashion.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Imagine a sad deflating balloon. There, that's IBM.

    FTFY.

  3. P. Lee

    Open source?

    My observation is that companies don't care so much about uptime/reliability, which is what Unix is all about.

    Selling hardware against Intel will be hard, but the bundle might be easier. Is it cheaper to use Power to scale your hardware and ditch the Oracle cluster that Intel would require? Do they need to offer cheap DR kit in order to get the sale? With companies competing so aggressively, customers are afraid not to go with an entire stack from one vendor, in case two vendors fall out. Does that mean IBM needs to aggressively push OSS tuned for their own hardware?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I may be wrong but the decline of IBM started when they allowed MS to shaft them over OS/2 and sped up when they stopped support for OS/2 rather than using it to forge ahead.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge

      "I may be wrong but the decline of IBM started when they allowed MS to shaft them over OS/2 and sped up when they stopped support for OS/2 rather than using it to forge ahead."

      Hard to say when IBM started to decline but I'm sure it wasn't just over OS/2. IBM was just a big ship that turns very slowly. They were used to having near monopolies in the areas they worked with and they never had that position with the PC.

      I used OS/2 for a long time and while it was a great leap from DOS and Windows of its time IBM should have pulled the plug earlier before Warp. It filled a niche in some businesses but NT4 delivered the final death blow. At that point (if not earlier) no business decided to focus on OS/2 as their core servers and desktops. They needed on outsider (Gerstner) to cut the pet projects that didn't deliver.

      IBM poured a lot of money into OS/2 at one point, and e.g. the free Lotus Office suite was great but 3rd parties just didn't bother either with drivers and software since the OS share was so minimal (chicken and egg). They should have just abandoned OS/2 and embraced Windows on the PC space.

  5. luis river

    Virginia desastrous

    IBM has spend in buyouts this last year aprox 6 bill. (Enterprise adquisitions) but the results follow negative, bad solution had the matter. Virginia firmly catch the CEO position.

  6. returnofthemus

    IBM has yet to get properly to grips with hyper-converged systems ....

    O ye, of little imagination https://youtu.be/Nk0VYb3a0z4, for everything else there's SoftLayer

    As for hyped-up converged based POWER Systems it's been on the market for well-over 24-months and it's called Elastic Storage Server.

    Next time I have to do your homework, I gonna charge

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: IBM has yet to get properly to grips with hyper-converged systems ....

      Elastic Storage Server is the appliance version of Spectrum Scale, in case you don't want to build it yourself.

      It's not converged/hyper-converged, any more than an EMC Unity or NetApp FAS are.

      This isn't a definitive list - other non-hyper-converged appliances are also available.....

      1. returnofthemus

        Elastic Storage Server is the appliance version of Spectrum Scale

        LOL, yes it is, well done, furthermore an it's installable driver (not VM image) transforming local HDDs, Flash PCI cards and RAM cache into a distributed storage continuum with global consistency, able to sustain data rates of 2k files/sec or 30Gb/sec and above. In contrast to hyper-converged appliances shows that only 3-5% of clustered servers should have local disks, yielding the optimum balance of access density versus metadata traffic. It also runs on x86, POWER & z Systems, as well as supported on Windows, Linux, AIX & zOS.

        Whoops, sorry I got carried away, exactly how are you defining Hyped-Up/Converged?

        PS IBM do SuperConverged too! https://youtu.be/ErZRSQoTFXw

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Elastic Storage Server is the appliance version of Spectrum Scale

          ESS is an appliance made up of IBM Power 8 servers, SAS attached JBOD disk expansions, networking and Spectrum Scale software. It doesn't run compute workloads at the same time and it's not hyper-converged - it's a scale out file system appliance.

          Your cut and past from a previous AC comment on Scale is proving what? (aside from you don't know the difference between an appliance and a piece of software)

          http://forums.channelregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/10/20/ibm_storage_hardware_revenues_decline/

          If you're that unsure of what hyper-converged is, do some more reading and then try to type less - you'll come across as a lot more knowledgeable (remember, cut and paste isn't your friend if you don't understand what you're pasting).

          1. returnofthemus

            LOL, oh I see, you mean't Hyper-converged Appliance!

            Now is that:

            1) Nutanix software running on Dell hardware,

            2) Simplivity software running on Cisco hardware. or

            3) Atlantis Computing software running on Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo and/or Supermicro hardware

            PS Incidentally, who told you that you couldn't run a compute workload on an ESS appliance, we've had an Linux workload running on ours for the last 18-months, you appear to lack the same imagination as the author.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: LOL, oh I see, you mean't Hyper-converged Appliance!

              Did you mean "meant"? LOL.

              It may be a little nuanced for some, but ESS itself was designed to only run Spectrum Scale, but if you choose to run Linux based workloads on the Power 8 nodes, you apparently can (and apparently have), but I'd not recommend it from a support perspective (did you get an RPQ approved for that?).

              To put it into perspective vs HCI, would anyone buy Simplivity, Pivot 3, Nutanix, etc, etc, if the only supported/approved workload was Samba on Linux?

              I'm also hopeful that you're being disingenuous about understanding what should / could / might / never should be described as being "HCI". If you've got an ESS, your organisation isn't in the little league and should hire people who can tell the difference.

              Ending on a high though:

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ss-59fi4nM&t=1m1s

              1. returnofthemus

                "I'm also hopeful that you're being disingenuous ..."

                A passing fad as my friends at IBM would tell you https://www.ibm.com/blogs/systems/look-beyond-hyperconvergence-to-hyperscale-converged-systems/

                Though kudos to Nutanix (Microsoft Cluster Server reimagined) on their exit!

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: "I'm also hopeful that you're being disingenuous ..."

                  From my perspective, if you can do something, but tell a customer "that's not the best way to achieve what you want", it's a lot more convincing than if you say "don't do it" and you can't do it.

                  Your friends at IBM saying that HCI is a passing fad might be true (but I doubt it), but it isn't very credible to me (and a number of others) as they don't have "a dog in the fight".

                  In other words, "they would say that wouldn't they.....".

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRDA_(slang)

                  1. returnofthemus

                    Re: "I'm also hopeful that you're being disingenuous ..."

                    LOL, you're like a dog with a bone!

                    Look there was probably no-one more disappointed than I when IBM decided to exit x86 Server business, but I got over it, you too can find happiness https://youtu.be/-Y0ak76W_Is, you just need to wean yourself off Windows.

                    However, if you're desperate to hyperscale on a tight budget, use the cloud, that's what it's there for, after all hyped-Up converged is nothing more than software running on x86 hardware.

                    You can do this with OpenStack, SLES, RedHat Ceph & Gluster, VMware, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, Scale & Object Storage and no doubt Microsoft Azure Stack when it's released

                    1. Anonymous Coward
                      Anonymous Coward

                      Dog with bone

                      Let's be clear - these cloud providers aren't doing hyperscale are they? Poor fools - please sort them out....and be sure to clearly explain to them their role in weaning the world off Windows as it's the biggest issue in the (IT?) world right now.

                      Or is the point that you can do the similar thing with different software (or lots of different software) by throwing extra resource at it? (that's amazing - I'm sure no one has ever noticed that before).

                      I see academia doing what you suggest (often badly), but that's partly down to money (lack of) and partly down to the excitement of "rolling their own" - it's an academic exercise after all.... :-)

                      For most organisations, they want IT to just work (and to be as close to "single throat to choke" support) - they're not aiming to run a lab / play pen for people with sandals and beards to make their CVs look better.

                      On a related note, do you have "hyped-Up converged" as keyboard short cut or just as saved in your "ready to paste" selection. If you don't, you should consider it as you'd get about hour a week back to do something more interesting.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hollow

    IBM's senior management is hollowing out the company searching in vain for the mythical "shareholder value" unicorn. The entire company's one or two steps from the grave.

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