The Server Room Blog : Tags : price

Sunsets can last a while, but in the end the sun will go down. I talk to a lot of companies and listen to a lot of data center managers. Customers trust their AIX-Power and Solaris-Sparc platforms. These are solid platforms and deliver good features and reliability, but, if these managers could get the sense of security, performance, and reliability with Linux / Intel Xeon platforms, they would move tomorrow. It is simple economics.

The reality is that customers are making this move, and being successful. The hardware reliability on Intel platforms today is amazing. Intel recently announced that their next generation of Xeon(Nehalem) EX based servers will support Machine Check Architecture. This brings high end Xeon X86 servers into the RAS family previously reserved to proprietary RISC & mainframe platforms. Intel Xeon already eclipses the performance of proprietary RISC processors both on a per processor basis and a per dollar basis. It is reasonable to say Xeon can deliver better performance, better value, and equal or better reliability. The only hurdle left is the software.

Linux has come a long ways. It is no longer a university OS, run by geeky dudes in black T-shirts emblazoned with the quadratic formula. It is mainstream and solidly supported. Linux is the primary development and delivery platform for Oracle. Other OS environments are ports, delaying support and innovation. Linux is used by major financial companies. Linux is available in solid and well supported distributions with a 20 year history of enterprise business. Linux experts are broad community, worldwide, and growing in number. Linux is economical vs proprietary RISC.

In an era of big budgets and conservative (don’t make any changes) philosophies, businesses will always stick to their proprietary RISC systems. That era is over. Sticking to your RISC systems may seem like the safe move, but failing to examine the opportunities for better performance and lower cost with Linux on Intel Xeon platforms is business negligence. Business negligence is seldom rewarded.

Performance, Price, Infrastructure, Ecosystem, TCO, RAS – when the decision factors are examined it becomes clear - we are in the RISC twilight and the sun will set on Sparc-Solaris and Power-AIX.

7 Comments Permalink Tags: server, enterprise, intel, price, performance, reliability, risc, nehalem

Have you ever asked yourself that question when you are bombarded with marketing messages from multiple different companies on why choose their products vs. a competitors product?. As a non-Engineer in an engineer centric company, I certainly have thought about this several times and asked myself a very simple question - Why should I choose one architecture type over another offering?

I suppose the best place is to start at the beginning and try and decipher the acronym soup of RISC, x86 etc. I decided to use my ‘old friend’ Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ to help with this process. What I found was another alphabet soup that I could have researched for hours, but try and simplify it below. I attach my detailed definition findings at end of this blog.

Simply put, RISC (pronounced risk) is a CPU design to use simplified instructions to execute very fast thus providing higher performance. x86 is a generic term that refers to the instruction set of another CPU architecture. So basically both RISC and x86 are types of instruction sets linked to CPU architecture.

So which one should I choose?.

Call me old fashioned, but as a business guy, it always comes down to 3 basic tenets in terms of making a decision

1) I like choice and the ability to pick and choose between multiple suppliers to get the best deal to meet my needs.(and the ability to change supplier without major obstacles)

2) Performance is really important. The higher performance means that I get my work done quicker which reduces the overall cost / improves time to revenue and ultimately improves the productivity of my business

3) System cost and total cost of ownership are key decision points in today’s era which is vastly different from the ‘dot.com’ boom. It is all about managing the bottom line through good decisions around CAPEX and OPEX spending

I applied my decision criteria and quickly found out that there is not a lot of choice from a hardware and operating system perspective with RISC architecture. In fact it looks quite the opposite of choice which always concerns me, call me pro-choice if you like, but I like the ability to move around suppliers!. On the other hand I found x86 to have lots of choice with many hardware vendors to list and a range of operating systems from windows to Linux and Solaris.

Having choice out of the way, I then moved onto performance for my business and looked at published results from many hardware vendors on different websites like http://www.spec.org. what I found was that Intel based systems had a lot of leading results against architectures like SPARC from SUN or Fujitsu and POWER from IBM.

I then looked at price (and being an ex-Accountant in my past career) nearly jumped for joy when I saw that system prices were low for x86 systems compared to the comparable RISC systems.

This analysis helped me understand it better and helped simplify my decision making.

Here is a short video with a little bit more detail. I would be interested in your thoughts and have you had any similar experiences that you would like to share.

2 Comments Permalink Tags: datacenter, intel, performance, xeon, risc, x86, sparc, power, price, benefits, consolidation

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Twilight - Sun is setting for Solaris and AIX?

So what does RISC really mean to you?

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