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Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

 
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Adamco11
Occasional Advisor

HP integrity vs IBM power6

We are evaluating the above platforms running HP-UX/AIX for a new SAP implementation. Some of the criteria are

1-Performance
2- Availability on both planned and unplanned downtime
3- Virtualization
4- Clustering
5- Ease of management and administration

There is HP-UX skillset but not on virtualization or clustering. So far I have

IBM
1- POWER6 processor is winning on performance by 2 fold (makes it harder to pass on)
2-I believe AIX doesnot reboot as much as HP-UX when applying patches.
3- lpar is available on all servers whereas vpar is only on HP's cell-based systems. Only HP virutal machines can be applied to blades the entry servers

HP-UX
1- Inhouse skill set on basic administration
2- Doesnot need a VIO server like IBM's single point of failure

Can you please comment on the above criteria/add to it and shed light on differentiators (maybe serviceguard?)
17 REPLIES 17
VK2COT
Honored Contributor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Hello,

I am an HP employee for the last eight years.
I also worked for and with all major IT
vendors in last 23 years. The IT games
and advertisements are interesting at times.

I think this might be a wrong forum to ask
these questions due to possible biased
opinions.

For example, what do you expect HP employees to answer?

Or, what would IBM employees say?

The best method for you is to
ask each vendor to provide several
references and then check them yourself.
Make an educated opinion based on your
independent assessment.

For the sake of brevity, let me say
that I have lots of information that
does not confirm your findings above.
I cannot share them here unfortunately.

You need to ensure that 2x performance claim
is confirmed and valid, for example.

Plus, ask yourself about total cost of
ownership, power consumption, scalability,
performance per Watt usage, does it have
mature compilers, proprietary processor architecture, and many more questions.

I grew up with view that I need to verify
things for myself. We are all different :)
I advise the same to others.

As my late father used to say: if you
do not take control of your destiny,
somebody else will do it for you and
PROBABLY stuff it up :)

Cheers,

VK2COT
VK2COT - Dusan Baljevic
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Your question is going to start a war in this forum. Anyway,

I would say that every vendor has very similar offerings for the items 2-5 that you mentioned. As for item 1, I would not believe that there is a 2x performance difference. How did you arrive at such a figure? Or did someone else arrived at it for you? Typically there is a 5% to 10% difference in performance from one vendor to another and that difference changes direction from time to time as vendors update their products. So vendor A might be ahead by 10% this month, 2 months down the line vendor B may be ahead by 5% etc. But never a 2x difference.

One other criterion that is important is your installed base and migration to, upgradability and interoperability between your installed base and your possible new platform.

Sales reps will talk miles a minute and hide things from you until it is too late so be very careful.
Adamco11
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Thank you for the insights. I did not mean to stir problems. I just want some technical differentiators. I have more HP-UX experience (5 years) than AIX (2 years). The power6 speed is 3.5-4.7GHZ while integrity maxes at 1.6GHZ. I saw some java/linux benchmarks that verified that claim.
Adamco11
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

HP will come up with the quad-core processors which will match IBM's 2-core speed by end of 2008. The problem is most software licenses are by core.

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Cards on the table first - I am an HP employee.

Processor 'speed' as measured in MHz/GHz is no representation of processor 'Performance', it simply tells you a clock speed for the processor and not a lot more...

As for benchmarks, there are a number of points:

i) You have to look at benchmarks 'in the round' rather than looking at any one benchmark. Power does very well at some benchmarks (notably TPC-C), but not so well in others. I'd say that Integrity does pretty well in all benchmarks, so gives more balanced performance. I'm sure IBM would disagree with me though!

ii) If you are going to look at one benchmark, look at one that matches closely to your requirements in terms of application profile. You mention SAP, so I would imagine you would want to look at the usual SAP SD benchmark rather than some Java benchmark.

iii) To be honest, I expect the CPU performance of either a Power or Integrity system would be sufficient for your requirements - in IT we are guilty of focussing too much on 'speeds and feeds', because they are quantitive amd easy to measure. However when it comes the total cost of owenership, these things count for little. Ask yourself (and ask your SAP BASIS people) 'what features and functions will make my life easier?'. Think about:

- Management tools - can I manage all my SAP components from a single pane of glass?
- Virtualisation products - how well do they fit into my SAP landscape?
- Storage integration - what products are available to simplify backup/restore or system copy?


I'd start from here on the HP side for identifying these 'value-adds'.

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/11813-0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=hpr_R1002_USEN

HTH

Duncan

I am an HPE Employee
Accept or Kudo
Adamco11
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Thank you Duncan. I checked SAP SD benchmarks are there is a performance difference. In my initial post I didnot just ask about processor speed. I had five criteria I am trying to evaluate our TCO. Number 3 is virutalization and number 4 is clustering. What features of VSE that differentiates it from PowerVM for example? HP has service guard for SAP , Does that mean it has build-in scripts to manage SAP instances failover? what differentiates it from IBM HACMP.
melvyn burnard
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

For SAP clusters, there is the Serviceguard Extension for SAP (SGeSAP) toolkit that gives you the tools for automating failover of SAP DB and CI

Take a look at:
http://docs.hp.com/en/ha#Serviceguard%20Extension%20for%20SAP
My house is the bank's, my money the wife's, But my opinions belong to me, not HP!

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Hi,

The key differentiator in VSE vs IBM is electrically isolated partitions (nPars) - with 11iv3 these are now quite flexible, but offer a level of isolation that Power cannot (a failure in one CPU in a p590 can bring down the entire system - all the LPARs - the same failure on a Superdome would only effect the nPar wuth the failed CPU). In addition I would say that the VSE managment tools (nearly all done through Systems Insight Manager) are simpler and easier to use than the IBM equivalents. In addition the VSE management suite is well integrated with Serviceguard, whilst I don't believe the same is true on the IBM platform.

For Serviceguard vs HACMP, they are very similar, but as you have correctly identified IBM do not provide out of the box integration with SAP (at least I'm not aware that they do), whilst HP do (you can call SGeSAP just a bunch of scripts if you like, but I think they go further than that in that they are tried, tested and supported solution). Read p13 of the SGeSAP manual to get an idea of all the functionality provided:

http://docs.hp.com/en/T2803-90011/T2803-90011.pdf

HTH

Duncan

I am an HPE Employee
Accept or Kudo
Adamco11
Occasional Advisor

Re: HP integrity vs IBM power6

Thank you guys. How does vpar virtualizes I/O without having an I/O server partition like IBM's VIO server?
Can someone comment on IBM's support quality?