16Gbps FC

16Gbps FC is already here - been shipping a couple of months as in the article (18% of Brocades FC shipments)

When will 40Gbps be here realistically and widely adopted?

10Gbp adoption is still pretty slow as it costs more than 8Gbps FC purely from an aquisition cost. I appreciate you can get TCO savings through convergence though.

Don't think FC is dead quite yet and will remain as a transport mechanism for datacentre storage for a fair while yet.

Cisco have always been behond the curve on FC SAN performance - software wise they are pretty good though

So true my backside last AC

If theres one thing HP-UX isn't its unstable, and performance is pretty good. P does have an advantage in pure performance terms but its not as big as they imply on there marketing slides.

Itanium probably is on its last legs but not because the reasons you state - purely down to Oracles play pulling the rug out from under it.

I say this as someone who works for a company who sells both IBM and HP, pre- the Oracle announcement the new Tukwila systems were building nicely especially for SAP based solutions. SAP and HP-UX has long been a trusted platform, and you don't expect people to run a core business app like that on something thats unstable, anything but is reality.

Old news

Come on guys this is nothing new HP have had this and are OEMing the Violin products for sale on two platforms

1) the Itanium Blade system and Superdome 2 and 2) the Scale up DL980 G7 that runs Xeon's.

So not sure why Violin won't comment.....

They've been on the HP pricebook at least 2 months

Really????

"The P9500 does not and cannot replace it."

So because I can't put 1152 2TB SATA drives in it its not a replacement? HP and I believe HDS also now have taken the decision to use the SFF drives becuase thats where the drive manaufacturers are going in terms of product development - so when larger capacity drives are released your argument falls down completely.

Seriously does anyone really buy Enterprise Storage just to load it up with SATA drives?

In my experience with the XP/HDS storage platforms (10 years +) people buy them for typically two reasons:

1) They need the best levels of availability for storage they can get

2) They need to be able to scale performance up and out

Being able to shove in a truckload of SATA drives is rarely a consideration

Of course you neglect to mention through the EMC tinted spectacles that you can always have 247PB of virtualised lower tier storage behind the P9500, but lets not let accuracy get in the way of a good headline eh?

Gotta love the EMC quote though - thats a good sign that they are worried, I remember going on an EMC course and if the instructor had spent more time focussing on their products than fudding the competition (amusing though it was) I might have learnt something more about their products.

Facts not FUD please!

Roll up, Roll up, get your IBM here

Yet another unashamed advertising piece for IBM from TPM, it would be nice to see some objectivity after all thats what I thought journalism was about.

Please bring back the objectivity!

Re: Markk - Some do care

"Intel has plants and significant investment in Israel, who's lone ally is the US. Customers in neighboring countries prefer not to buy products made in a country that has a poor human rights record, starves residents of Gaza, and maintains apartheid policies towards Palestinians. I learned this important lesson when trying to sell our products to Saudi's."

I love that the Saudi's are concerned about human rights yet are quite happy to condone amputation, execution by stoning, and the exclusion of women from mainstream society (could be viewed as a societal apartheid of women).

What about the human rights records of the countries surrounding Israel - the ones that the UK fails to extradite terrorists to because their human rights "might" be violated.

Or maybe it was an excuse cos Galaxy's are lame compared to Proliant and X-Series?

Quite an odd move

OK they are focussing on the 7000 series which is fine for entry and midrange but is not a credible enterprise/mission critical offering in so many ways. Guess I'm more surprised they havent jettisoned the re-badged LSI stuff as that really overlaps with their own tech.

Or could it be a sign that Pillar are ready to prop up the Storage biz?

Bizarre!

Last AC you really are quite dull.........

Since when has core clock speed on different processor architecture ever been a relevant comparisson? Someones already posted it but AMD had a big advantage performance wise over Intel at one point with Lower clocked CPU's so that kind of disproves that statement.

Its not how fast it clocks its what you do with it that counts is whats important i.e. something measureable like SAPs per CPU

No doubt we'll have to continue to put up with this until some real benchmarks are published so we can all make an educated comparisson between the two processors not one based on rumour and pure fud from the (Mainly) pro IBM brigade. In the mean time this is all speculation.

PS I think Tukwila's biggest issue won't be performance but its lateness to market.

You hear rumours, I heard a rumour that IBM sold some product to Nazi Germany - oh no thats true!

Kebbablurb

Simples - you are confrontational, arrogant and aggressive in your posts- no wit & no humour

OK Matt is a bit obnoxious but usually in a very obvious and humourous fashion.

I don't mind you sticking up for what you believe in - perfectly fine with me, its the way you do it - why don't you think about that.

I don't get annoyed with FUD because I see it for what it is, every vendor does it, its part of the game - water off a ducks back is what it is.

Would love to chat more but have work to do

TTFN

Re: Nice work

Couldn't agree more,

I can't think of another individual who has polarised my opinion of SUN so much, his sheer arrogance and ability to alienate the reader is beyond belief.

I now have an irrational dislike of SUN simply because of Kebabmuppet, which is a bit unfair on SUN but as the saying goes People buy from People so tough!

Adios Kebabburp May the Schwarz be with you

The ravings of a lunatic

In a world of blind people the one eyed man is King, unfortunately the world is not blind so the one eyed man is just, well, one eyed.

Peeps you must remember the rules when talking to our Special friend Mr K - he's very special... about his "debates". They often turn into mass debates......

1) You are not allowed to express opinion or personal experience despite your industry knowledge or accumen (I wonder if Larry expressed his Opinion what the reaction would be??)

2) You are only allowed to use SUN friendly benchmarks from a SUN approved source (i.e. BMSeer)

3) You are not allowed to use any irony or wit (its deadly serious this IT stuff)

4) All people who use non Siebel related benchmarks that do not show T2 Niagara CPU's in a good light to back up their own arguements will be shot. These are plainly lies subliminally implemented by the IBM thought Police.

5) He's always right - the rest of us are completely brainwashed by IBM or HP and he is the paragon of the IT world - all hail

Now Mr K tootle off and play World of Warcraft, watch Avatar or whatever - its obvious you don't know how to work with people.

Re last AC

I agree and I have credited them for that if you read my post, however due to the nature of peoples jobs its not always something thats referenceable due to confidentiality. Unfortunately people do use this to their advantage to promote misinformation but thats the nature of free speech.

Citing benchmarks is fine - but how realistic are they in the context of what people do on a day to day basis? If all we can point to is super tuned benchmarks that don't use real configs that people can deploy in the real commercial world then how are they more relevant than someones opinion based on experience? Of course one is subjective and the other objective and thats the fundamental difference.

One point Mr Bryant consistently makes is that the best thing to do is bench real configurations with your app stack and make your own mind up. To me thats a sensible point of view as it means you aren't getting false expectations based on a benchmark for a server that is far removed from what you'll actually deploy.

However I also tire of his constant references to "Slowaris" which is just as tedious as Kebbaberts Niagara monologue.

Re:Kebabbert

I am allowed to be agnostic if I like, its about having an open mind and not being beholden to any particular IT company.

It means I can be impartial when advising people what best fits their requirements rather than shoehorning in a solution that will leave them with a sour taste because its the only thing I can talk about even when its not appropriate. Its what makes me successful in my job and people value my opinion. You see I can appreciate that for some use cases Niagara is appropriate, the same for Power, the same for Xeon/AMD/Itanium, it all depends what they want to do.

The reason I would like you to shut up and the reason I reacted is because you have one arguement, thats the sum of it, you have made your point (repeatedly) and its becoming tedious. Imagine listening to the same song on the radio ad infinitum and thats what you are like. You could have the best arguement in the world but I for one have tuned out to it.

As far as I'm concerned anyone is entitled to their opinion (its not a facist state after all) providing they can back it up with reasoned debate. In fairness to you, you do attempt to do this where not all others do, but you can't go around calling everyone liars and morons where they have a conflicting view based on their personal experiences.

Who are you to call them a liar, have you worked in their environment? No you haven't.

Have you any non benchmark related real IT experience? its impossible to tell as you only talk about benches.

Yes you are entitled to your opinion, all i am suggesting is you bring something new to the table

RE: AC Sick of Squabbling & Kebbabert

Me too hence the post and it was hardly self serving, I'm neither a SUN or IBM fan really, pretty agnostic in the scheme of things.

True MB does throw the first one here but at least its with some semblance of a sense of humour (unfortunately Kebbabert hasn't got one of these from the evidence I've seen on various debates). He says he is fed up of trolls and fudders, I think he is turning into what he claims to loathe.

Why would any sane person claim that people who have opinions are morons, everyone is entitled to have one, just because it doesn't agree with your veiwpoint doesn't mean they are a moron. What it does make is the poster a very small minded individual with no concept of actually holding a debate. Propoganda is not a debate!

And as for feeling sorry for me then that had me in stitches, I have a life thanks. It looks like Kebbaberts consists of reading Niagara benchmarks and Solaris user manuals.

The reality of the CPU benchmark is that it really doesn't matter. IT is increasingly controlled by the bean counters and they only really care about reducing risk, increasing profits and reducing cost of ownership.

Unless you can translate these features into true business benefits then good luck selling it.

Cue various unsubstantiated accusations of being a liar/fudder etc etc ad infinitum

Truly guys its getting boring!

Adios for now

Kebbabert please shut up

Stop raving on like an automaton about bloody Niagara, I think everyone has had enough of this to last them a lifetime (please back me up here guys!)

Just change the record man its getting extremely boring!!! Not every debate has to turn into a Niagara benchmark debate, have you got any other points of view???

Broken Record

I'm beginning to think that Kebbabert is an automated program that runs whenever MB spouts some stuff at SUN. I've seen this response sooo many times its getting boring

STOP,...well please stop..the pair of you

re:asdf

I don't think Alpha is all it was cracked up to be, for example I've worked with customers who had OpenVMS on Alpha and have now moved to Itanium and they are really pleased with it, mostly because it completely kicks the ar5e end out of their old Alpha boxes (Which were EV7's so no slouches) on performance as well as delivering the same level of reliability at a much reduced cost.

Having worked in this area for some time now the Itanium chip isn't all that bad, its not got the raw grunt of Power or the market penetration of Sparc, but its still a decent reliable chip that does a pretty good job and importantly gives customers a choice to keep the market honest and interesting. I think the biggest issue Itanium has is that the 1st gen chips were a POS! The current ones aren't too bad though.

More like SUN is cheaper??

So HP sells 8,358 boxes at $713.7m so circa $84k average sale price per server

SUN sells 30,977 boxes at $850.3m so circa $26k average sale price per server

So looks to me like SUN is owning the low end, with HP selling more into the mid-range and high end?? Nothing new here SUN has always owned the lower end of the UNIX market particularly in EMEA.

Possibly the big hits that SUN have had (down 47.2%) are in the high end where they have been hit by the demise of ROCK as their low end looks to be fairly strong based on shipments

I don't think its anything to do with confidence just same old buying patterns

SUN = lots of lower cost boxes serving the low to mid tier

HP & IBM = fewer higher cost boxes serving the mid- higher end

I would think that due to the average sale price that HP's retained margins will be better than SUN's but who knows

But hell its just statistics!

I would be quite so triumphant here as both companies are doing toilet,

Anyone with any sense....

.....Would never use an MSA for anything approaching 5 9's availablity. At the end of the day you get what you pay for. If availability is the driving factor you don't buy a cheap box like the MSA.

In fact I'm pretty sure HP don't market them as 5 9's, for that they want you to buy at least an EVA or XP (if you need serious availability). Pretty sure they position MSA as 3 9's from the presentations I've seen.

Hang on a second

Sorry the Proliant benched at 25,530 SAPs - 300 less han the SUN system - a typo on my part

Still the arguement stacks up

Hang on a second

Now i've had a look at the SAP SD Benchmarks and whats very interesting to note is that the Proliant config delivered pretty much the same level of performance but with 1/4 of the memory of the SUN system.

So is the real winner here actually AMD not SUN or IBM??

T5440 = 4770 Users & 25830 SAP's

vs

DL585 = 4665 Users & 25830 SAP's

So does this highlight a weakness in the Niagara architecture vs AMD in that it requires significantly more memory to achieve similar performance to a Proliant with AMD. It would be interesting to see how the T5440 would bench with just 64GB of RAM.

Now i'm thinking the Proliant will have a significant price/performance advantage here and probably a lower cost of ownership.

RE: Mr Doner

"It doesnt fight cache misses, instead it has fast access to RAM and works with another thread while waiting for data"

So if your app doesn't have lots of threads, then it does have to wait around on a Niagara CPU because fast access to RAM won't be quicker than Cache.

So I guess the question is how many threads would typically be used in the majority of mainstream applications, and does an ISV have to put in extra work (and how much effort is this) on an app that needs to be "optimised" to work with Niagara over and above Power or Itanium.

PS the comparing core to core performance is relevant for two reasons:

1. Lots of software is licensed per core

2. HP and (I think) IBM don't have to enable all the cores in a CPU,

IBM's (predominantly) German friends

I think that the Nazi thing came from an IBM subsidiary in Germany during WW2 (De Ho Mags or something like that) that made all the record keeping machines they used to keep track of people. The Nazi's were meticulous record keepers. I read this in a book by Jeffrey Deaver so how much is true I'm not sure, I can't think it would be fictitious (unless IBM sold him a duff PC once!).

Ironically (not sure if this is just an urban myth) but IBM won't sell into the gaming industry on moral grounds??

EPIC design vs RISC

re: AC

Its all to do with the lifecycle of the product, current Power is a very mature product in terms of its lifecycle, whereas Itanium is still relatively new and has a long way to go in terms of its lifecycle. Power is ahead now and performing well (although Itanium compares favourably in Specfp and some other benchmarks) in the main number crunching space. However I think as the Itanium product matures (if it does that is!) it will eventually overtake Power, simply because there's only so far you can take the RISC architecture (I confess I don't know how much further it can go).

However its not all about the speeds and feeds, but how you can apply them to affect business processes. Despite alot of the clamouring on these boards HP-UX isn't a bad OS, its actually very flexible, stable and secure.

The reality is a lot of statements are made based on slides that we've had from the vendors that selectively show benchmarks where they win (because thats what marketings there to do!), consequently we all think that one or the other is better. Most of these benchmarks are rarely run on real world configurations that we'll see deployed. The true test is to have your application run on each one of these.

Whenever I've seen this happen (mainly on Oracle based apps) Power needs less cores than Itanium (roughly 30% less) and Itanium needs less cores than SPARC (roughly 50% less). SUN's tactic here has been to discount the ar$e out of the tin to make the overall cost of ownership comparable when taking into account licenses for applications - which to be honest is their best option. HP do likewise competing with IBM. This is my personal experience i'm not saying its gospel