pSeries vs Superdome

[Dario_1]

Hi All!

It has been a long time since I don't participate in the Forum but I always make some time to read some of the answers and questions.

I am currently working in a project that will consolidate 6 HP-UX servers into a Superdome. Sweeeet!!! The problem I am having is that IBM is trying to get their pSeries servers in our company but we have no AIX experience at all nor pSeries servers.

I need to know if there someone there that has or had IBM experience and can make some comments about their product. Basically, performance issues, dynamic configuration of resources, availability, support and also mayor differences between the Operating Systems.

Any input will be appreciated.

Regards,

DR

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

I quote you:

we have no AIX experience at all nor pSeries servers.

This is reason enough to avoid AIX.

Superdomes are winning most of the performance measures with Oracle. They are superior machines.

SEP

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi, I dont knoe how it is in USA, but Belgium/Switzerland (and french speaking part that is...)when it comes to support I would say IBM is the last of the class(although they are improving), so it depends what you are running and the level of support you expect, there are good documentations (red books) aix is easy to configure, I work with H50, H80 Pseries and SP2s + some bull escalas(they are great - more drivers etc...), sorry no P690...) smit (sam's equivalent) is the best administration out, but when it comes to tuning you really suffer, I also dont have a good experience of HACMP...
And the is no ITRC (Still the fastest and friendliest support - where you dont feel so lonely when things go wrong and you are alone in the room...)
My 2 cents
All the best
Victor

[Ian Dennison_1]

Reasons to stay put,... basically the same reasons Windoze is dominant over LINUX right now. Retooling incurs a large overhead in terms of the changeover effort, plus the sacrifice of platform-specific experience and training.

If the HP kit aint the problem, don't replace it! And if this is cost driven, get some quotes and then hammer the vendor for a price break!

Share and Enjoy! Ian

[Dario_1]

All:

Thank you for your answers. Please keep them coming, I will assign point later on.

Regards,

Dario

[Paul Cross_1]

It's my experience that changing platforms incurs huge cost. Training, purchasing new applications, downtime and slower turn around time are all costs over and above what an organisation is used to paying for.
On the other hand, sysadmins get to learn something new and get to play with new cool hardware, although I'd rather play with a superdome...

[Todd McDaniel_1]

My company is currently trying to require crosstraining and reassigning SAs to different platforms. Which in the long-run can be good.

However, we have expert folks in every major OS who can train those who migrate to a new OS. YOU dont have that.

Also, as suggested there would be a big ramp-up and a long while to allow for the learning curve before your SAs would again be "expert" at AIX.

My company has fallen in love with the Superdome. I had the first Production one in the company 2 years ago(2002), and now there are over a dozen and more coming...

Growing pains can be just that and learning a new OS and H/W can be rather difficult esp when you have no current SMEs (subject matter experts) in your company... at the rate of training nowadays, you will spend a small fortune on that as well...

However, the hardware may be a wash and the service contracts as well... The big loss in productivity cant be measured, imho, not to mention the loss of R/D on your part b/c you have no expertise with the new OS to develop new tools...

Granted Unix is UNIX, but OS differences can muck it up.

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

Not to forget that if you change platform/OS you will/should have a much larger testing plan.

good luck.

Jean-Luc

[Mark Grant]

I'm not suggesting that you move to AIX from HP if that is what you are used to. The superdome seems a fine machine and you know the OS well.

However, come on guys/gals AIX isn't that different!! It's probably better than HPUX in some areas. Logical volume management is better, dynamically tuned kernel is better and smit makes sam suck enormous rocks. The idea of major config files being stanzas based, though irritating to script with, is actually a good idea. Nice and easy to read.

Ok, granted, the printing system was belched from the pit of hell and "startsrv" is a mental case but it isn't that big a deal!

AIX - simultaneously the best and most annoying, irritating unix there is!

[Mark Greene_1]

You have to look at it from two perspectives: cost of acquistion, and cost of ownership.

IBM has deep enough pockets that they can essentially undercut any price HP quotes you in order to get a foot into your business. The question is, will they? If there is potential for much more business in the future, they may. Don't be afraid to play that card, but don't over play it either.

As has been stated, you need to look at performance. How solid are the performance numbers you are getting from HP for the Superdome? Will IBM give you performance info, and how solid or not will it be? How expandable/upgradable is each system? What are the projected lifetimes?

From a cost of ownership perspective, if IBM or HP (this is your first Superdome, right?) are willing to throw in classes with zero cost of attendance and you only have to pay travel expense, then that addresses your issue with experience.

AIX is easier to admin than HP-UX in some way, not so in others. In my opinion, SMIT is a better admin tool than SAM simply because it has more functionality, i.e. there are more commands that have been incorporated into SMIT than SAM.

On the other hand, IBM doesn't have anything that resembles this forum, and independant resources on the web for AIX are scarce. The other thing to check is market share: how many Superdomes are out there vs. pSeries? What percentage of admins in the industry have experience on either box? I.E., if you have to high another admin, how long is it going to take to find someone who's worked on either platform?

Finally you have to find out what your management considers the hot topics to be, and make sure that those are addressed as well.

Good luck
mark

[Tim D Fulford]

Ignoring on-going training, admin etc... Purchased performances can be compared using
www.tpc.org

pSeries
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103091201

SuperDome (Itanium)
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_result_detail.asp?id=103091201

The HP Superdome with PA8700 chips will be about 1/2 the tpm-c of the Itanium (~500,000)

Note the Itanium is $8.33/tpm-c and pSeries is is $11.13/tpm-c

To really meaningfully rate the servers you probably need to consider how many CPU's you want PLUS tpm-c may not be the benchmark for you!!

[Dario_1]

Thank you for all your answers. I think I have the information I need.

Regads,

DR

[Ted Buis]

On February 9th, 2004, HP announce the PA-8800 based systems. These are dual core processors with a 32MB L2 cache which allows for 2X density and up to 1GHz clock rate. Thus Superdome can have twice as many processors as before that are faster. You can upgrade existing Superdomes to the PA-8800 (no mixing) as you can upgrade them to the Itanium 2 processor. The PA-8800 chip uses the same cell board as the Integrity Superdome with Itanium 2 processor, so there is even more memory bandwidth. Also, IBM doesn't support hardware partitioning. They only have software partitioning, which doesn't offer the same degree of isolation of one OS instance from another.

[Alzhy]

In this day and age of "IT Does Not Matter" - so should we prepared by becoming multi-prenuers - which literally means having multiple skills sets and acquiring those skills sets rapidly. And IMHO, acquiring "skills" and knowledge these days no longer require formal TRAINING as EVERYTHING is on the INTERNET (thank you Google and sites like this. Besides, practically ALL vendors publish most of their documentation on-line. So you must subsist on technical documentation.

I have always believed that the best way to ramp up a UNIX SysAdmin's comfort level in a new platform/dialect is to let him work on an actual box and let him go through all the usual tasks that he knows on 1 or more dialects. Mostly the differences are in storage management (Logical Volume Management), bootstrapping and device managemnt.

So IMHO, these days UNIX SysAdmins should think/profess along the lines of "UNIX Dialects Do not Matter". Think always that the good CIO wil always have ROI and the corporate coffers in mind - and will always be looking at ways to cut costs.

Amongst the current enterprise offerrings though - the dual-core PA8800's are safe bets for enterprises looking at consolidation. When Solaris 10 (and if Sun will still be viable that is) is released - then their "containers" approach is a likely candidate as Grids would have already been an easy implementation - regardless of CPU and size.

[poson]

good

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Hi,

We are implementing a large SAP project on IBM machines. We got the training for AIX, HACMP, TSM.... The performance is great. We don't have the equivalant HP power to compare with IBM, but the IBM support in our area is good.

AIX is easy to administer. You have smit, dynamic kernel tunning, online JFS, online file systems extension (even /).

You can search this forum for HP-UX vs. AIX remember I saw some good repsonses in the past.....