I would love to see a performance test between a big x3850 intel machine
running linux and a power machine in the same price range on AIX, I think
the power machine is going to get a decent challenge. I even doubt it will
win that race but there is more to a TSM server than raw performance as said
before. The aix lvm, device drivers and great long lasting TSM support for
each major release are amongst the big advantages.
I am on my 5th sles version in i think 7 years of running TSM on sles and
upgrades are a bit more of a hassel than with AIX. AIX 5.3 just now lost
support with TSM 6.3!
On Oct 12, 2011 5:54 PM, "Paul Zarnowski" <psz1 AT cornell DOT edu> wrote:
> We have kept with Power, largely because we (1) have AIX skills in-house,
> and (2) the effort to migrate to another platform would be great, because we
> have significant archive data.
>
> Some thoughts (take them as you will):
>
> 1. You can scale power vertically, quite high. We have 10 very sizable
> instances on two p750s. Each p750 has many FC HBAs on it, which are shared
> by all instances on that server. If we used intel instead, we'd likely have
> to purchase many more HBAs, or divide up our tape/disk resources so that
> they are not all sharable. It is nice to be able to share everything with
> everything. We can keep adding processors and RAM for some time.
> Higher-end p7's scale even higher, but we found the 750 to be a nice fit
> for our needs, giving us considerable head room.
>
> 2. I have two resource baskets to monitor/plan for instead of 10. When I
> add RAM to a server, for example, it benefits all of the instances running
> on it, not just 1.
>
> 3. Power 7 has 4 SMTs per core, vs 2 for Power 6, and 1 for Power 5 and
> earlier. If you look at the SPEC ratings, you will see that this translates
> to greater workload handling per core for Power 7 vs earlier Power, for the
> same GHz. I am not sure what this looks like on Intel. I would look at an
> appropriate SPEC benchmark when comparing platforms vs something simplistic
> like processor speed (GHz). Speeds can be very misleading.
>
> 4. I am a fan of AIX's LVM and management suite. I admit I may be biased,
> because I have lived with it for so long and know it, but as I have
> considered Linux, I have become aware of some things that it does not yet
> have, or doesn't have as nicely as AIX does.
>
> I will be interested in what others have to say, as I share Allen's
> perspective on revisiting assumptions periodically.
>
> ..Paul
>
>
> At 10:05 AM 10/12/2011, Stefan Folkerts wrote:
> >I would like to see that as well, I find it impossible to believe without
> >proof...and I love the power platform just not because it's 4x as fast (at
> >least) per core as x86 for TSM because I don't think it is. :-)
> >
> >On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Gregor van den Boogaart <
> >gregor.boogaart AT rz.uni-augsburg DOT de> wrote:
> >
> >> @Howard Coles:
> >> > For every 1 proc or core
> >> > of Power you would need 4 or more of x86 (even at their best level).
> I
> >> > have seen the numbers from Intel comparing Newer x86 processors to
> >> > Power6 and they are just below the Power 6 (using 2x's the number of
> >> > cores).
> >> Do you have a reference, link, pdf, ... for this?
> >>
> >> > The problem is, You can get Power7 cheaper than Power6, and get
> >> > twice the performance.
> >> And for that?
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >>
> >> Gregor van den Boogaart
> >>
>
>
> --
> Paul Zarnowski Ph: 607-255-4757
> Manager, Storage Services Fx: 607-255-8521
> 719 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3801 Em: psz1 AT cornell DOT edu
>
|
