IBM has improved the processor of its JS20 blade servers and now sells them with its AIX version of the Unix operating system, the company plans to announce Tuesday. When introduced, the JS20 could only run Linux, but now the blades can also run AIX.
IBM brings Unix, faster chip to Power blades
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Eugenia Loli
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That’s the model with power saving features… does that mean a G5 notebook is just around the corner?
Or maybe still G4 for next notebook?
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9752
I’m having a hard time understanding the value behind these JS20 blade systems as it violates the very value proposition behind the blades. Fist off the Power gear is expensive and there is little if anything to be gained in terms of Power scalability from within the blade, Power blades could be useful for highly cpu bound tasks such as in HPC computing but for business applications the effectiveness is limited. Second, blades shine when used with very cheap to license OS’s, such as Linux (RedHat and SuSE don’t cound), which is obviously not the case with AIX and RHEL. IIRC AIX will set you back something on the order of 1700 odd dollars per processor and RHEL is not far behind, which will make your licensing more expensive than the actual blade system! If RISC blades are your thing, then Sun UltraSparc should be your way to go, since Sun doesn’t charge for Solaris licensing on the blades — you end up with a much cheaper system.
Overall I would say blades are soon to become yesterday’s technology as new virtualization technologies at the server level can offer better bang for the buck. On the Unix front Solaris 10 with zones is likely to make blades more or less irrelevant — you can’t beat an ability to slice 1 CPU into a few thousand virtal servers!
a few thousand ? are you sure about that figure ?
> a few thousand ? are you sure about that figure
If I remember correctly the preliminary zones documentation on sun web site quoted something about 4000 zones limit per OS image.
if i am thinking about this correctly, Sun said that they can make 4000 zones share 1 cpu (4000 virtual servers)
wouldnt that be a bit too much ?
or have i got the idea totally wrong
The 970FX has been out for a while; Apple’s G5 machines are using it.
The choice between blades and VMs/zones depends on your workload needs. If you only need 2-4 processors total, then zones looks like a good choice, but if you need, say, 20 processors, blades will be cheaper than a large SMP.
Blades do some things well, while SMP machines do actually everything well – but it costs. I.E. there is a class of applications that will not scale well with blades, but will scale well in case of a shared memory/fast backplane SMP architecture. So, sometimes you WILL shell out the moolah for a 70+ CPU monster, even though a 35 blade rack may have the same number of CPUs.
Blades have the advantage of space, that is it, If you have the space you could allways get similar hardware cheaper. for people that are charged per u for rackmounting. it is great/
why not just switch to linux only? Why use AIX? Where ARE IBM’s OS plans? Can anyone give me a clue on what the hell they are doing with their OS plans? Part of the site says migrate to linux and one part says how AIX is great.
Is it really a good investment to use AIX or shall someone just buy the blades and use linux or freebsd?