Posts by dedmonst

Re: What's your definition of "competitive"?

As an ex UNIX sysadmin, a lot of this resonates with me, but I have to tell you, you are fighting a battle that most customers and buyers have long moved on from. You might not like it, I might not like it, but its the cold hard truth.

>> IBM's solution has superior resiliency features to anything offered by Intel or AMD

True 10 years ago - not in any meaningful way now. Xeon and Epyc have largely caught up on the CPU resiliency features apart from a few corner cases. IBM still get the advantage of owning the whole hardware/firmware/hypervisor/OS stack (at least assuming the customer isn't deploying SAP HANA in which case you have to use Linux for Power which is let's face it even more of a boutique product than Linux for Itanium was). But for the price you pay, an x86 implementation can afford to deliver resiliency in other ways. Long story short hardware reliability isn't usually the weak link in the chain these days.

>> They care about TCO - i.e. how much does everything cost

When TCO models take into account the cost of IBM support, and the cost of finding those IBM specialists to manage the kit, it rarely works out lower cost than hiring ten-a-penny Linux and VMware admins (with apologies to those folks - this isn't how I think, but it is how decision makers think)

>> Licensing costs for enterprise applications like SAP or Oracle can easily dwarf the hardware price.

1. Everyone is moving off Oracle as fast as they can - sure there are those who are stuck or those who have Stockholm Syndrome, but this isn't a growing market. It's a shrinking market.

2. SAP isn't licensed per socket or per core, so it's of no consequence there. Everyone on SAP is moving from databases licensed per socket/core to HANA which again isn't.

TL:DR the best tech rarely wins. Power 10 will do well with existing IBM customers who have deep pockets, but it will continue to slowly slide to a similar position to IBM's System Z portfolio. A fantastic money-earner for IBM and super-important for their small and decreasing number of big customers, but pretty much irrelevant for 99% of folks in IT.

As others have pointed out - you clearly haven't looked recently - for most of their product range, HPE just require you to have an account on their sire and you can access patches/updates etc.

Although their Integrity (IA64) systems are an exception to this I think - why you would want to operate something like that without a support contract is beyond me.

And with regards to getting HPE to support 2nd hand kit - of course they will with some provisos:

- You can expect to pay a "return to service fee" in addition to a standard service contract.

- You can expect them to ask you to prove any HPE software on the platform is properly licensed

- In some cases you can expect the first 30-60 days to incur T&M charges (for those lovely folks who try to return their system to support only when it has failed!)

Re: *Slurrrrrrrp*

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, given that almost every major tech co bends over backwards to the PRC government in order to get access to their citizens, there are probably easier targets to go after.

Re: Forget the discount

Not the same, because other contracts don't say at the end of them "and now you must pay us much $$$ just to get your own data back" - i.e. egress charges.

And which price is it that AWS have consistently *not* reduced? Egress charges.

The whole edifice of public cloud pricing, technical architecture and governance is constructed to make this a one way transaction. I'm not claiming that other models are better, merely go in with your eyes open because once you are in they will "own you" as much as the big SIs have owned government IT

Re: Why?

>I was in some training with some HPE support people not long ago and someone mentioned they'd

>worked on some K series servers back in the day. The HPE guys were saying they know several

>customers still running them, They stopped making those box before Y2K and have to be years out of

>support.

Not quite - the last generation of HP9000 K series systems was the K380/K580 - these were still sold until 2001! With regards to support they went onto mature product support (just break/fix with no firmware updates) in 2007, but HPE would still give you a support contract for these systems right up until the end of this year. Pretty much all HP9000 systems go completely end of support at the end of 2020.

Re: Unplugging the keyboard = kernel panic ?

>> I loved the old PARA-RISC HP hardware. One could do a full backup without starting the OS using embeded firmware.

COPYUTIL FTW!

Libertarian?

"If govt does X which might be good then Y might happen in the future which isn't good"

That seems like an argument for government never doing anything. Are you a libertarian?

Re: How does cache coherency work on such a system

All of the up to 8-socket (glueless) designs just use standard Intel UPI (was QPI) connections between the processors - same as in a 4-socket box, except you get extra NUMA latency domains as you don't have enough UPI links to direct connect all CPUs together.

For the boxes that scale over 8S (like the KunLun and HPE's Superdome Flex), typically one of the UPI links to each processor is connected to custom silicon (think FPGAs) that act as agents/proxies to filter the coherency protocols and in some cases cache data as well. This is why these systems can typically use Gold Intel CPUs as well as Platinum CPUs - the limit of 4 UPI device IDs per group of processors in Gold CPUs isn't a problem as they access others via the agent/proxy silicon.

>> It's nothing to do with misogyny and everything to do with incompetence.

>> But women have some better choices, such as Nursing for example.

if it quacks like a duck...

Re: Nope

But that won't happen - what will happen is that the minister will be "lobbied" by certain companies and we will see GDS continue down its current road of travel to become the "Departments for AWS and Azure"

Re: *yawn* Meanwhile, in UNIXland...

HPE Itanium systems... yeah only 8TB in a Superdome2 server, but then that's likely constrained by demand rather than capability - why spend the time certifying bigger DIMM sizes when folks aren't asking for it?

x86 Systems (which is where this action is really at)? HPE Superdome X goes to 24TB with 64GB DIMMs and 48GB with 128GB DIMMs.

Of course the prototype of "The Machine" has 160TB, and that will be (maybe not yet) persistent memory as well.

UNIXland does it big, but honestly (and it pains me as an ex-UNIX admin to say this), it's just not relevant any more.

Not sure...

... if your post was supposed to be sarcasm or not...

but for the avoidance of doubt - the IEA is funded by British American Tobacco, Philip Morris, and Japan Tobacco International. Of course they don't like to publicise this...

In my mind, that doesn't make them a "venerable freemarket thinktank", it makes them corporate shills.

Re: If King Arthur is Dell and the Green Knight is HPE, what does the White Rabbit represent?

Extending the Lewis Carroll references a little - surely AWS is the "Snark" (or is that a Boojum as your job softly and suddenly vanishes away)

The only reason there's a zone in the UK in the first place is because some people have data sovereignty issues... I suspect that for many who use the UK service, another one isn't a possibility

It's impossible to draw any conclusions from these numbers as both are program costs without taking into account at all parts of these programs which are actually delivering benefit now (however poorly), so the comparison is essentially meaningless.

Re: dedmonst Yawn

>> you can go argue the toss with HP's own configurator tool.

I use it every day - I can build this configuration no problem - of course the 11K series racks in the config tools these days can hold up to 3000lbs static or 2500lbs rolling, so that's not surprising. It would be *close* with an older 10K series rack but still possible.

>> I think you're forgetting that four fully-configured C7000s means you have twenty-four C20 power sockets to feed, which means lots of hefty 32A PDUs to stick in your 10642 rack. Things got worse if you needed intelligent PDUs (which most companies I worked with did), which were even heavier again.

No, I'm not - I mentioned the "power distribution infrastructure" in my previous post. 24 x C19s = 4 x PDUs with 6 x C19 sockets - these come in at about 8Kg ea. for standard and 9Kg ea. for Intelligent.

Long and short of it - yes it was a tight squeeze, but always possible - I don't doubt that the config tools have said "not possible" on occasion, but they do make a bunch of assumptions - if you sit down and work all this stuff out by hand you can do it.

Re: Well...

That's Hewlett Packard Enterprise, not HP Inc.

Get the right company!

Re: great opportunity

Do you really mean manufacture? As in Dell would also need to persuade Intel/AMD to open a processor fab in the uk; Someone like Micron to open a memory fab in the UK; Western Digital to open a hard drive factory in the UK... and onward for all the other components that make up a computer?

Or did you mean "assemble" rather than manufacture, in which case you get to pay for all those components in dollars (cos that's what they are traded in) and then use our "famously cheap high quality well trained" UK workforce to assemble them - then you get to compete to sell them against all the countries that aren't weak vs. the dollar... on WTO tariffs until something else is negotiated.

Re: What happens when...

Matt Bryant didn't work for HP

Re: There was technology max maximise hardware usage before virtualisation

>Using VMs allow you to allocate resources (and enforce thoise allocations) to particular VMs.

>Running multiple apps on a single OS instance does not.

Again using a "proper" operating system (read, any of the commercial UNIX still out there) you _can_ run all your apps on a single OS instance and enforce resource allocations.

See Solaris Zones, HP-UX Containers and AIX WPARs

Never used it, but there's even a product to do this on windows & linux - Parallels Virtuozzo - no idea if it is any good or not...

Of course the challenge comes when you need to operate at different patch levels and with different kernel parameters, but again these OSs will handle some of this to a greater or lesser extent, and if that doesn't work, THEN you can virtualise the OS.

oops typo

>> another 6-8 hours until 12pm, and sometimes 2pm

I meant of course:

another 6-8 hours until 12pm, and sometimes 2am

so your logic is...

... our bosses sh*t on us, so we don't care (in fact we'd actively encourage the idea) if your bosses sh*t on you...

I don't work in the public sector (they couldn't afford me - what does that say!), but I take no joy in seeing them take the brunt of this current round of media viliffication... people all seem to forget that these aren't "faceless beaureacrats", they are real people with homes and cars and families... no doubt as with _any_ organisation, there are efficiencies to be made (heck there are plenty of horribly inefficient private sector organisations out there!) but if you think public sector pay is one of them, I suspect you are wide of the mark.

And as for the pensions... well talk to public sector workers - few beleive they will ever get what has bee promised - they all know its only a matter of tiume before the government (whichever one it might be) reneges on the pension agreements in the same way the private sector has done.

The worrying thing in the private sector is just how many folks have no pension provision at all any more... the practice of moving jobs every 3-5 years (often as the only way to get a pay rise), means many have tiny packets of investement all over the place - personally I expect the retirement age to have been raised so far I 'll end up working til I drop!

does it matter?

total pin compatability probably doesn't matter to most end users... how often are they really going to take out one processor and insert another??

what matters here is that the systems vendors can use volume chipsets in Itanium servers rather than custom chipsets - that makes overall systems pricing lower

if I understand the material released so far, HP will be able to produce up to an 8 socket/32 core Itanium server which could share almost every component with their x86 servers - that might not sound interesting technically, but it does mean that these systems benefit from the economies of scale HP have in x86 server manufacturing

what no-one seems to grasp here except for Intel is that the processor business these days is less about technology and more about volume/supply chain economics