Comments for Information Technology Leaders Forum http://itlf.org Connecting IT with your Business Tue, 25 May 2010 15:30:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Comment on Linux vs. AIX by Rakesh Singh http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-179 Rakesh Singh Tue, 25 May 2010 15:30:58 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-179 I've been working on AIX for about 9 years and at the last company, we had over 900 LPARS. On my personal machines, I run Linux and have been doing so for about 7 years. Unfortunately, as other mentioned, Linux never gained momentum as the powers that be had the 'warm fuzzy feeling' with Solaris and AIX (and even Windows). Personally, from a hardware perspective, I love the virtualization options on the p-Series with its micropartitioning, shared processing & memory pools etc. On Linux, I miss AIX's LVM, NIM, hardware management, WPARS, Live app mobility etc. Maybe I am fortunate, but we never had any major issues on AIX. Neither have I had major issues on Linux or FreeBSD. The biggest claim is that the Power6/7 chips are the fastest cpus around, but I've heard otherwise from those with new Intel cpus. I'd like to see independant benchmarks besided TPC results etc. If the performance of Intel comes close to, or betters the Power cpu, and one does need the 'bells and whistles' of the p-Series/AIX combo, then the Intel/Linux combo makes the most sense. Question is, would you then run Linux or perhaps Solaris/OpenSolaris & benefit with zones, ZFS etc. ? :-) I’ve been working on AIX for about 9 years and at the last company, we had over 900 LPARS. On my personal machines, I run Linux and have been doing so for about 7 years. Unfortunately, as other mentioned, Linux never gained momentum as the powers that be had the ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ with Solaris and AIX (and even Windows).
Personally, from a hardware perspective, I love the virtualization options on the p-Series with its micropartitioning, shared processing & memory pools etc.
On Linux, I miss AIX’s LVM, NIM, hardware management, WPARS, Live app mobility etc.
Maybe I am fortunate, but we never had any major issues on AIX. Neither have I had major issues on Linux or FreeBSD.
The biggest claim is that the Power6/7 chips are the fastest cpus around, but I’ve heard otherwise from those with new Intel cpus. I’d like to see independant benchmarks besided TPC results etc.
If the performance of Intel comes close to, or betters the Power cpu, and one does need the ‘bells and whistles’ of the p-Series/AIX combo, then the Intel/Linux combo makes the most sense.
Question is, would you then run Linux or perhaps Solaris/OpenSolaris & benefit with zones, ZFS etc. ?
:-)

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by Jeff Collins http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-147 Jeff Collins Fri, 07 May 2010 14:31:25 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-147 Look at IBM's new p7 750's and the economics become much more blurred. Look at IBM’s new p7 750′s and the economics become much more blurred.

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]]> Comment on Liebert-CW CRAC Shaft Problems (Breaking/Cracking) by Jason Peen http://www.thegeekpub.com/741/liebert-cw-crac-shaft-problems/comment-page-1/#comment-34 Jason Peen Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:13:22 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=303#comment-34 Hi Mike - I worked for a company a few years ago who I can't name. But, we had this exact same problem. We called Liebert for support and they denied it. We didn't replace our pulley system either. This was stock stuff. I think the shafts are designed to fail after a few years. Certainly think it is in their best interest for a lot of parts in their units to fail. Like plastic gears in the condensate pumps. Give me a break. Hi Mike –

I worked for a company a few years ago who I can’t name. But, we had this exact same problem. We called Liebert for support and they denied it. We didn’t replace our pulley system either. This was stock stuff. I think the shafts are designed to fail after a few years. Certainly think it is in their best interest for a lot of parts in their units to fail. Like plastic gears in the condensate pumps. Give me a break.

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by JAYT http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-10 JAYT Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:09:33 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-10 And one last thing. Whether IBM’s premium price is justifiable or not pales into insignificance compared to the heap of sh1t that is SAP. Its architecture is from the late 1970’s and is just about the best way to ensure you need to pay IBM a lot more than you first thought. The SAP marketing message that it “Solves All Problems” also fools only those gullible enough to look no further than the first paragraph – so usually the IT director then. Once you’re in, you have the widest scope application system on the planet, almost none of which will fit the business functions you need – and you’re fully locked in with the only resource able to help you a limited pool of very expensive independent consultants and an even more expensive group of consultancy firms who really should know better by now. And one last thing. Whether IBM’s premium price is justifiable or not pales into insignificance compared to the heap of sh1t that is SAP.

Its architecture is from the late 1970’s and is just about the best way to ensure you need to pay IBM a lot more than you first thought.

The SAP marketing message that it “Solves All Problems” also fools only those gullible enough to look no further than the first paragraph – so usually the IT director then. Once you’re in, you have the widest scope application system on the planet, almost none of which will fit the business functions you need – and you’re fully locked in with the only resource able to help you a limited pool of very expensive independent consultants and an even more expensive group of consultancy firms who really should know better by now.

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by JAYT http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-9 JAYT Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:56:38 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-9 IBM’ers do love their kit, don’t they? Dells are not perfect. But they do not claim to be. And don’t cost an arm, a leg and probably fingernail extraction. Saw some problems on AIX 5.3 LPARs including permissions failures. But the biggest problem was the pure marketing illusion involved in the multi-core measurements. Some multi-cores have hardware pipelines, some software pipelines, but POWER5 has “marketing pipelines”. Hardly surprising that one of the biggest computer companies in the world still tries to abuse its position, but really, a “high-availability” SAN that requires downtime to extend production filesystems? A software LVM replication system that crashes production systems but is said to guarantee data replication without knowing anything about the data its replicating? (Error correction and detection only goes “so far”. If “so far” corrupted a database block six months ago, your business is toast.) IBM’ers do love their kit, don’t they? Dells are not perfect. But they do not claim to be. And don’t cost an arm, a leg and probably fingernail extraction.

Saw some problems on AIX 5.3 LPARs including permissions failures. But the biggest problem was the pure marketing illusion involved in the multi-core measurements. Some multi-cores have hardware pipelines, some software pipelines, but POWER5 has “marketing pipelines”.

Hardly surprising that one of the biggest computer companies in the world still tries to abuse its position, but really, a “high-availability” SAN that requires downtime to extend production filesystems? A software LVM replication system that crashes production systems but is said to guarantee data replication without knowing anything about the data its replicating? (Error correction and detection only goes “so far”. If “so far” corrupted a database block six months ago, your business is toast.)

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]]> Comment on Hosting on Verizon FiOS by Greg http://www.thegeekpub.com/767/hosting-on-verizon-fios/comment-page-1/#comment-3 Greg Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:35:20 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=4#comment-3 Thank you for dispelling myths – I have FIOS at home and have implemented it at one of our offices. Speed is the key for us and for many users. The FIOS internet circuit is delivered straight to our firewall, and the users are VERY happy – we are doing some minimal VOIP as well. Thank you for dispelling myths – I have FIOS at home and have implemented it at one of our offices. Speed is the key for us and for many users. The FIOS internet circuit is delivered straight to our firewall, and the users are VERY happy – we are doing some minimal VOIP as well.

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by UnixDude http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-8 UnixDude Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:48:02 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-8 I’ve been around AIX since 1993 and I’ve worked on as a hands on admin as recently as AIX 5.3 w/VIO on 64 way p595 hardware. I like IBM AIX/pSeries but it’s not bulletproof as IBM marketing will lead you to believe. I’ve experienced numerous AIX crashes (on 5.3+) that required kernel developer involvement and I’ve seen our expensive p595 hardware crash hard due to hardware/firmware failure of a non-redundant nature. Above all, it’s expensive. Linux/Intel Nehalem is a serious contender to proprietary Unix/Risc. I’ve seen the industry benchmarks and performed my own Oracle/Data Warehouse benchmarks between P6 and Nehalem. The performance gap has been closed with Intel QPI technology. Commodity hardware is finding its way into our data centers. The long term question is simply, “Do I want that hardware to run Windows or Linux?”. I’ve been around AIX since 1993 and I’ve worked on as a hands on admin as recently as AIX 5.3 w/VIO on 64 way p595 hardware. I like IBM AIX/pSeries but it’s not bulletproof as IBM marketing will lead you to believe. I’ve experienced numerous AIX crashes (on 5.3+) that required kernel developer involvement and I’ve seen our expensive p595 hardware crash hard due to hardware/firmware failure of a non-redundant nature. Above all, it’s expensive.

Linux/Intel Nehalem is a serious contender to proprietary Unix/Risc. I’ve seen the industry benchmarks and performed my own Oracle/Data Warehouse benchmarks between P6 and Nehalem. The performance gap has been closed with Intel QPI technology.

Commodity hardware is finding its way into our data centers. The long term question is simply, “Do I want that hardware to run Windows or Linux?”.

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by StockCrank http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-7 StockCrank Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:38:14 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-7 <strong>–Insults removed by admin–</strong> Good luck with your Dell/RedHat combo. Come talk to me when it starts throwing random ACPI kernel panics. I know a solution that fixes it about 60% of the time. What a vast oversimplification. So go out and buy your Dell R900 for 35k. You going to run all your SAP tiers on one box? Of course not. So take SAP – ECC. You are going to need 2 of your sweet Dell boxes for DB redundancy. $70k. Oracle RAQ doesn’t work well with SAP, so what you going to use. Veritas Cluster/Storage foundations most likely. OK .. shell out another 15K per pair of boxes for that. 85k On top of it all your are going to need several several additional boxes PER TIER. A CI and several application servers. You’re looking at about 19K EACH. A Fortune 500 company would probably be needing 3-4 app servers minimum per SAP application to reduce load on the CI. A R710 would probably work nicely for that at about 15k ea (60k) Now multiply this by the number of SAP applications you are deploying. Lets be conservative: ECC, CRM, HR, SCM. 240k in app servers + 85k = $325k. That just bought you your production environment. Do it all over again for QA. You could probably skimp a bit on DEV. I’ve done this excercise — the RFP’s really aren’t that much different cost wise. Want to use virtualization to consolidate this horrendous hardware sprawl? Bzzzzt sorry. SAP doesn’t support any X86 virtualization technologies in anything more but a testing capacity. Sure you are paying 250k for something like a loaded P570 but you are usually also getting the full boat. PowerHA, DLPAR, PowerVM. And you can achieve far greater utilization and consolidation economies on the P gear. So go ahead and risk your job buying computers from Dell, operating systems from RedHat, Clustering from Veritas. I’ll just get a solution from IBM. (or Sun or HP for that matter) <strong>Mr Civikminded, or should I call you “Will Boege, IBM Global Services employee”? Ahh… the power of Google. I’ve deleted your insults as they are irrelevant for this conversation. But I do want to point some things out to you. 1) Don’t come on here spouting insults. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. 2) Arguments from IBM employees just drive home the fact you guys are scared of Linux. 3) I never said we WERE switching, we’re evaluating. And that’s what scares IBM the most. Obviously we’re not idiots. Obviously we will test and evaluate this idea. Obviously we would never deploy a solution that is flawed, that’s what testing and evaluations are all about! 4) I followed many of your posts on comp.x.x and zdnet, digg, etc. You have a problem with anything non-IBM and like to fly off the handle often don’t you? Geez dude. Why all the anger in your posts? - Mike</strong> –Insults removed by admin– Good luck with your Dell/RedHat combo. Come talk to me when it starts throwing random ACPI kernel panics. I know a solution that fixes it about 60% of the time.

What a vast oversimplification. So go out and buy your Dell R900 for 35k. You going to run all your SAP tiers on one box? Of course not. So take SAP – ECC. You are going to need 2 of your sweet Dell boxes for DB redundancy. $70k. Oracle RAQ doesn’t work well with SAP, so what you going to use. Veritas Cluster/Storage foundations most likely. OK .. shell out another 15K per pair of boxes for that. 85k On top of it all your are going to need several several additional boxes PER TIER. A CI and several application servers. You’re looking at about 19K EACH. A Fortune 500 company would probably be needing 3-4 app servers minimum per SAP application to reduce load on the CI. A R710 would probably work nicely for that at about 15k ea (60k) Now multiply this by the number of SAP applications you are deploying. Lets be conservative: ECC, CRM, HR, SCM. 240k in app servers + 85k = $325k. That just bought you your production environment. Do it all over again for QA. You could probably skimp a bit on DEV. I’ve done this excercise — the RFP’s really aren’t that much different cost wise.

Want to use virtualization to consolidate this horrendous hardware sprawl? Bzzzzt sorry. SAP doesn’t support any X86 virtualization technologies in anything more but a testing capacity.

Sure you are paying 250k for something like a loaded P570 but you are usually also getting the full boat. PowerHA, DLPAR, PowerVM. And you can achieve far greater utilization and consolidation economies on the P gear.

So go ahead and risk your job buying computers from Dell, operating systems from RedHat, Clustering from Veritas. I’ll just get a solution from IBM. (or Sun or HP for that matter)

Mr Civikminded, or should I call you “Will Boege, IBM Global Services employee”? Ahh… the power of Google. I’ve deleted your insults as they are irrelevant for this conversation. But I do want to point some things out to you.

1) Don’t come on here spouting insults. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.
2) Arguments from IBM employees just drive home the fact you guys are scared of Linux.
3) I never said we WERE switching, we’re evaluating. And that’s what scares IBM the most. Obviously we’re not idiots. Obviously we will test and evaluate this idea. Obviously we would never deploy a solution that is flawed, that’s what testing and evaluations are all about!
4) I followed many of your posts on comp.x.x and zdnet, digg, etc. You have a problem with anything non-IBM and like to fly off the handle often don’t you? Geez dude. Why all the anger in your posts?

- Mike

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by Linux Fan http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-6 Linux Fan Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:42:37 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-6 The argument “Linux is not ready for prime time” has been debunked over and over and over. You ever fly? I do – weekly. The Federal Aviation Administration uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage the 8000 planes in the air over the US at any given time. I’m not sure that workload could be any more “mission critical.” http://customers.redhat.com/2007/10/15/federal-aviation-administration/ NYSE Euronext is running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. $141 billion in trades per 6.5 hour day. That’s over $6 million per *second* – they didn’t choose RHEL because of cost, they chose it for reliability and support. http://customers.redhat.com/2008/05/12/nyse/ Bottom line is, the old-school thinking “no one got fired for buying IBM” is just that – old school. Today, it’s all about collaboration, speed, reliability and support. If you can get that kind of performance and reliability for a fraction of the hardware and software cost, the question is why *wouldn’t* you? If you’re not adopting Open Source, you’re already way behind. The argument “Linux is not ready for prime time” has been debunked over and over and over. You ever fly? I do – weekly. The Federal Aviation Administration uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage the 8000 planes in the air over the US at any given time. I’m not sure that workload could be any more “mission critical.” http://customers.redhat.com/2007/10/15/federal-aviation-administration/

NYSE Euronext is running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. $141 billion in trades per 6.5 hour day. That’s over $6 million per *second* – they didn’t choose RHEL because of cost, they chose it for reliability and support. http://customers.redhat.com/2008/05/12/nyse/

Bottom line is, the old-school thinking “no one got fired for buying IBM” is just that – old school. Today, it’s all about collaboration, speed, reliability and support. If you can get that kind of performance and reliability for a fraction of the hardware and software cost, the question is why *wouldn’t* you?

If you’re not adopting Open Source, you’re already way behind.

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]]> Comment on Linux vs. AIX by Dave Airlie http://www.thegeekpub.com/29/linux-vs-aix/comment-page-1/#comment-5 Dave Airlie Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:22:56 +0000 http://itlf.org/?p=29#comment-5 I’m with Yaniv, to say Red Hat hasn’t got a developer capable of supporting nearly every corner of the Enterprise Linux distro is off by a long way. There is bound to be large amounts of code in AIX where the developers have left the company and nobody left has any idea how they work anymore. I won’t argue with the hw support though, untargetted hw requirements can always be a pain, but without that you’d just have the same vendor lockin problems as AIX. I’m with Yaniv, to say Red Hat hasn’t got a developer capable of supporting nearly every corner of the Enterprise Linux distro is off by a long way. There is bound to be large amounts of code in AIX where the developers have left the company and nobody left has any idea how they work anymore.

I won’t argue with the hw support though, untargetted hw requirements can always be a pain, but without that you’d just have the same vendor lockin problems as AIX.

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