Given all the data arriving every day from everywhere — phone photos, tweets, digital voice, video files, and many more sources — service providers and enterprises can barely add capacity fast enough to keep up.
By emphasizing Linux on this latest set of Power platforms, IBM is appealing to cost-conscious IT managers high and low. Linux, the open source operating system, costs either nothing or just tiny nick compared to Microsoft’s Windows Server. And IBM has been developing Linux practically since the OS was born in Linus Torvalds's brain.
Over the past decade and more, the company has worked first to improve the initial code base, then to adapt it to IBM systems, then to make it one of the company’s mainstream offerings, and finally to position it as a key growth driver.
Marrying the low cost of open systems with a high degree of integration and value-add allows IBM to compete for business from buyers who normally look at low purchase price first and everything else afterward. These buyers, who seek boxes at the low end of the performance spectrum that scale out easily to take on tasks like big data analytics, certain vertical industry applications, and infrastructure services, want systems that can make use of a wide variety of software, set up quickly, and start delivering value right away. They also seek the benefits of virtualization and platform choice.
IBM is addressing this market with its PowerLinux 7R2 and PowerLinux Blades, which offer choice and flexibility at the same time as the ability to run a wide range of applications smoothly. The trick to this last capability is workload tuning, something at which IBM excels. Part of the appeal of the company’s Power-based systems is that the entire stack — hardware, middleware, and applications — can be tuned for specific workloads, in this case the most common ones in the scale-out Web world.
The PowerLinux 7R2, with two sockets, 16 cores, Linux, a secure hypervisor, and unlimited virtual memory, prices below a comparable x86 configuration with Linux or Windows and VMware, and the latter box has a 64GB per socket virtual memory cap, a less secure hypervisor, and half the number of threads and CPUs per virtual machine.
Clearly, IBM is appealing to IT managers’ cost consciousness. And yet, because of workload tuning, in many cases the 7R2 delivers higher performance.
Of course, you can’t tune everything in the universe, and so IBM has chosen workloads likely to fit well with a Web-based, scale-out architecture. Big data problems — like uncovering customer sentiment changes rapidly by analyzing Twitter traffic, addressing customer satisfaction by matching promotions in real time, and identifying criminals from disparate information feeds — fall into this category.
Using technology gleaned from its successful Watson development project, IBM has mounted its near-legendary ability to draw good intelligence from unstructured data in a Hadoop framework on Linux.
Another example of a tuned workload is the “hardened” platform that the company put together for the Russian market running Linux, PowerVM virtualization, the firm’s DB/2 database, and a number of locally created applications.
And in the university environment, PowerLinux systems are already acting as rapidly deployable Web, email, and social networking hosts — all running on completely open source software.
In an effort to encourage the adoption of PowerLinux, IBM is investing some of its considerable resources to fund independent software developers interested in the platform.
But that is not all. Oh no, that is not all.
By using its own silicon and open source software, IBM is able to price aggressively against comparable solutions. And despite these attractive prices, the company derives sufficient margin from these configurations to share some of it with partners, making the PowerLinux lineup one of the more compelling on the market today for both distribution and IT buyers.
Thus, despite its positioning at the low end of the server market, the PowerLinux 7R2 really does belong to IBM’s family of Smarter Computing systems.
Disclosure: Endpoint has a consulting relationship with IBM.
© 2012 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Twitter: RogerKay
