zEC12 Drives Buoyant IBM Results

IBM posted strong 4Q 2012 and full year 2012 financials on Tuesday.  So strong that the results beat Wall Street’s expectations, as did the technology bellwether’s guidance for the current year. The results bumped up IBM’s stock and helped fuel a market rally for a couple of days at least.

DancingDinosaur particularly liked the performance of the System z. Q4 2012 revenues from System z increased 56% compared with the year-ago period, reflecting the contribution of the zEC12 introduced in 3Q 2012. System z revenue in the growth markets increased 68%. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS, increased 66% versus the prior year and represented the largest MIPS shipment quarter in the company’s history, according to IBM.  New workload specialty engines, including the Linux IFL, represented one-half of the MIPS shipped, a further sign that Linux on z is finally gaining real traction after a decade.

Revenues from Power Systems decreased 19% compared with the 2011 period. DancingDinosaur expects that to turn around in 2013 as more Power products using the new Power7+ processor catch on and will get a further boost when machines running the POWER8 processor come out, maybe even in late 2013. DancingDinosaur wrote about Power7+ here back in October.

Let’s let IBM’s top boss, Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and chief executive officer gloat a little: “We achieved record profit, earnings per share and free cash flow in 2012.  Our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year was driven by our strategic growth initiatives—growth markets, analytics, cloud computing, Smarter Planet solutions—which support our continued shift to higher-value businesses. Looking ahead, we continue to invest to deliver innovations for the enterprise in key areas such as big data, mobile solutions, social business and security, while expanding into new markets and reaching new clients.  We are well on track toward our long-term roadmap for operating EPS of at least $20 in 2015. If you are an IBM fan, it doesn’t get much better than this.

DancingDinosaur was surprised that the System z was driving the bus this quarter. It expected the front position to be taken by services or software, not hardware and certainly not the z, which sometimes comes across as a multi-billion dollar afterthought.

Software was another high point. According to IBM, software rang up $7.9 billion, an increase of 3% (up 4%, adjusting for currency) from 4Q 2011. Of more interest to DancingDinosaur was IBM’s key middleware products, which are key to driving new workloads on the z.

The middleware products, which include WebSphere, Information Management, Tivoli, Lotus, and Rational rang up $5.5 billion, an increase of 5% (up 6%, adjusting for currency) versus 4Q 2011. Specifically, revenues from the WebSphere family of software products increased 11% year over year.  Information Management software revenues increased 2% and revenues from Tivoli software increased 4%.  The best performers were Lotus software (including IBM Connections), which increased 9%, and Rational software, up 12%.  It is these products, along with Linux on z and Java that enable the kind of new workloads mainframe shops are likely to run.

So, DancingDinosaur has to conclude that this was a pretty good week for IBM and particularly for those invested in the mainframe.

IBM Introduces POWER7+ and More

IBM’s Systems and Technology Group (STG) introduced a slew of new products and enhancements, both hardware and software, for the System z and Power. The System z announcements, which DancingDinosaur will take up in subsequent posts, focused mainly on software enhancements, such as new revs of CICS and Omegamon, for the zEC12. The Power announcements covered new capabilities as well as new machines. And all the announcements in one way or another address IBM’s current big themes: Cloud, Analytics, and Security.

Of the new Power announcements, Power7+ certainly is the star.  Other capabilities, such as elastic capacity on demand and dynamic Power system pools, may prove more important in the long run. Another new announcement, the EXP30 Ultra SSD I/O Drawer, may turn out quite useful as organizations appreciate the possibilities of SSD and ramp up usage.

Power7+, with 2 billion transistors, promises to deliver 40% more performance, especially for Java workloads, compared to Power7.  Combined with other enhancements Power announced, it looks particularly good for data and even real-time analytics workloads.  The new processor boasts 4.4 GHz speeds, a 10MB L3 cache per core (8 cores =80 MB), and a random number generator along with improved single precision floating point performance and an enhanced GX system bus. IBM invested the additional transistors primarily in the cache. All of this will aid performance.

The enhanced chip also brings an active memory expansion accelerator and an on-chip encryption accelerator for AIX. Previously this was handled in software; now it is done in hardware for better performance and efficiency.  Power7+ also can handle 20 VMs per core, double the number of Power7 VMs. This allows system administrators to make VM partitions, especially development partitions, quite small (just 5% of the core).  With energy enhancements, it also delivers 5x more performance per watt. New power gating also allows the chip to be configured in a variety of ways. The upshot: more flexibility.

Elastic capacity on demand (CoD) and Power System Pools work hand in hand.  Depending on the server model, you can create what amounts to a huge pool of shared system resources, either permanent or temporary. IBM has offered versions of CoD for years, but they typically entailed elaborate set up and cumbersome activation routines to make the capacity available.  Again, depending on the model IBM is promising more flexible CoD and easier activation, referring to it as instant elasticity.  If it works as described, you should be able to turn multiple Power servers into a massive shared resource. Combine these capabilities to create a private cloud based on these new servers and you could end up with a rapidly expandable private cloud. Usually, it would take a hybrid cloud for that kind of expansion, and even that is not necessarily simple to set up. The payback: greater agility.

There are, however, limitations to elastic CoD and Power Systems Pool. An initial quantity of CoD credits are offered only with new Power 795 and Power 780 (a Power7+ machine). There also is a limit of 10 Power 795 and/or 780 servers in each pool.

Enterprises are just starting to familiarize themselves with SSD, what it can do for them, and how best to deploy. The EXP30 Ultra SSD I/O Drawer, scheduled for general release in November, should make it easier to include SSD in an enterprise infrastructure strategy using the GX++ bus. The 1U drawer can hold up to 30 SSD drives (387 GB) in that small footprint.  That’s a lot of resource in a tight space: 11.6 TB of capacity, 480,000 read IOPS, and 4.5 GB/s of aggregate bandwidth. IBM reports that it can cut batch window processing by up to 50% and reduce the number of HDD by up to 10x. Plus, you can still attach up to 48 HDD downstream for another 43 TB. The result: great scalability and efficiency.

And this just touches on some of what IBM packed into the Oct. 3 announcement. DancingDinosaur will look at other pieces of the Power announcement, from enhancements of PowerVM to PowerSC for security and compliance as well as look at the enhancements made to zEC12 software.

HP-UX and AIX : The Difference is POWER7

HP’s enterprise-class UNIX operating system, HP-UX, faces a stark future compared to IBM’s AIX. The difference comes down to the vitality of the underlying platforms. IBM runs AIX on the POWER platform, now at POWER7 and evolving to POWER8 and even POWER9 (although the naming may change)—a dynamic platform if ever there was one. Meanwhile, HP-UX has been effectively stranded on the withering Itanium platform. Oracle has stopped development for Itanium, and Intel, HP’s partner in Itanium, has been, at best, lackluster in its support.

It not clear whether HP-UX is a better UNIX than AIX, but in an industry driven by ever increasing demands for speed, throughput, cost-efficiency, and energy efficiency, the underlying platform matters. HP-UX customers surely will outgrow their Itanium-based systems without a platform boost.

“There’s no question that [our] Business Critical Server business has been hurt by this,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in the transcript of an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D column. The business, which had been growing 10% a year before Oracle spurned further support of Itanium now is declining by 20-30% a year (Ouch!).  So Whitman is counting on two things: 1) winning its lawsuit against Oracle, which is still making its way through the courts and 2) porting HP-UX to an advanced x86 platform, namely Xeon. “Ultimately we’ve got to build UNIX on a Xeon chip, and so we will do that,” she told All Things D. All spring long there had been hints that this was imminent, but an official HP announcement never materialized.

Of course Oracle wants the HP customers running Oracle on HP-UX with Itanium to jump to its Sun platform.  IBM, however, has been wooing and winning those same customers to its System z or POWER platforms. Oracle runs on both the z and POWER platforms.  Running Oracle on Linux on System z yields substantial savings on Oracle licensing. But IBM wants to do even better by migrating the Oracle shops to DB2 as well, with incentives and tools to ease the transition.

What HP customers also get when they move to POWER or to the z is a platform in both cases with a real platform future, unlike either Itanium or Sun’s server platforms. DancingDinosaur has long extolled the zEnterprise and hybrid computing, but POWER is dynamic in its own right and when you look at the role it now plays in IBM’s new PureSystems, another IBM hybrid platform, POWER becomes all that more attractive.

From the start HP with HP-UX and Itanium was bound to have to settle for compromises given the different parties—HP, Intel, Oracle—involved. With POWER7, IBM system developers got exactly what they wanted, no compromises. “We gave the silicon designers a bunch of requirements and they gave us our wish list,” says Ian Robinson, IBM’s PowerVM virtualization and cloud product line manager. As a result POWER7, which runs AIX, Linux, and System i on the same box, got a slew of capabilities, including more memory bandwidth and better ways to divide cores.

POWER7, which amazed the IT world with its stunning Watson victory at Jeopardy, also is turning out to be an ideal virtualization and cloud machine. The rate of virtualization and cloud adoption by POWER7 shops is running something north of 90%, notes Robinson. The adoption of PowerVM, the POWER7 hypervisor built in at both the motherboard and firmware levels is close to 100%. And now POWER7 is a key component of IBM’s PureFlex initiative, a major IBM strategic direction.

Meanwhile, Whitman is fighting a costly court battle in the hope of coercing grudging support for the Itanium platform from Oracle. The trial began in June and mud has been flying ever since. Even if HP wins the case, don’t expect the story to end soon. Using appeals and delay tactics Oracle could put off the final outcome so long that Itanium will have shriveled to nothing while POWER7 continues along IBM’s ambitious roadmap.

System z Finally Comes to SmartCloud

A few weeks ago IBM announced it was bringing the System z to its SmartCloud Enterprise offerings.  This raises a few questions, for starters: what took IBM so long? You could argue that the mainframe, as the original time-shared system, has been doing an early form of cloud computing for decades. More recently, mainframes have been available as hosted services at the company’s data centers.

Maybe a better question is why now? Might it be that Oracle bolstered its cloud offerings earlier this month? Similarly, barely a week ago EMC announced a cloud venture with a Verizon subsidiary. Not to be left out, HP also announced an updated converged cloud strategy last week. In that sense, IBM was ahead of the curve with its latest SmartCloud enterprise announcement, including System z. The industry’s sudden infatuation with big data is driving vendors to bolster their public and private cloud offerings.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ for System z, as IBM describes it, is a cloud computing service designed to meet the evolving needs of IBM mainframe organizations. The service provides shared, secure and scalable IBM z/OS mainframe capacity delivered as secured logical partitions (LPARs) within a continually refreshed, managed environment residing in the cloud. IBM suggests companies will adopt this offering to avoid capital outlays for hardware and reduce software expenditures as they move toward a pay-for-use financial model.

In fact, IBM presents what amounts to myriad public, private, and hybrid cloud offerings. The IBM System z Capacity Offering for Cloud allows for partial balancing of incremental capacity growth on IBM zEnterprise 196 or z114 during a twelve month period. The offering enables companies to deal with business change by moving capacity between systems and even between locations.  As to be expected, IBM constrains how much you can rebalance, although the constraints are based on an unusually straightforward formula.

The IBM System z Disaster Recovery Offering for Cloud offers active capacity mobility between IBM zEnterprise 196 or z114 primary servers and disaster recovery servers. As IBM explains: companies need to test their disaster recovery capability by running production at the disaster recovery site over an extended period of time, such as when wanting to ensure, in the event of a disaster, all systems and processes can efficiently run from the disaster recovery site.

To that end, System z Disaster Recovery Offering for Cloud allows active capacity mobility between z196 or z114 primary servers and mirrored disaster recovery servers. With this offering an organization can perform a thorough disaster recovery test longer than a CBU test by moving its primary active workload on z196 or z114 to its disaster recovery server for up to 60 days. Usually this is needed to satisfy stringent audit or compliance requirements.

Again, the product comes with a few constraints.  For example, a workload may be moved up to four times a year, and for each move the maximum time a workload may run on the Disaster Recovery machine is 60 days.

There are more IBM SmartCloud offerings than noted above. And DancingDinosaur expects to see other z offerings in the cloud moving forward. Fully virtualized from the start, the z is a natural for the cloud. Power, another highly virtualized and integrated IBM system that should play well in the cloud, also has a SmartCloud offering now.  It’s about time.

IBM PureSystems Hint at the Future of zEnterprise

IBM’s April 11 announcement of PureSystems family of products was focused on POWER and x86 systems. A closer look, however, suggests the initiative both leveraged some of the advances of the zEnterprise and zBX and hints at extending the PureSystems approach to the zEnterprise.

To summarize, PureSystems is the name IBM is giving to a family of integrated appliances. These combine physical and virtual server, storage, and network hardware in the form of POWER and Hx5 blades with the appropriate middleware and software to deliver a system that is fast, flexible, and simple to deploy and maintain.

The first two products in the family are PureFlex, which provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and PureApplication, which provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  The clear implication is that more PureSystems are on the way. Don’t be surprised to see something like PureAnalytics, maybe followed by something like PureTransaction.

For the introduction, IBM pulled out a couple of its biggest guns. Said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president of software and systems: “By tightening the connections between hardware and software, and adding software know-how, PureSystems is designed to help organizations free up time and money to focus on innovation.”

PureSystems, however, is not the typical appliance most vendors deliver by repackaging existing technology and wrapping it up in a spiffy interface. PureSystems was designed and engineered from the ground up to deliver flexibility, simplicity of operation, efficiency, and lower cost.

Rod Adkins, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, called it “a new category of business computing that combines server, storage and networking resources along with an array of built-in software patterns and business processes into one highly automated and simple-to-manage machine.” IBM’s goal was to change the economics of IT by addressing the issues of time, cost, and risk.

The PureSystem device arrives private cloud capable. It is thoroughly integrated, automated, and optimized using an extensive set of patterns that encapsulate the best hardware, software, deployment, and management practices. Plus, it offers a facility to pull in third-party patterns or add your own custom patterns.

IBM expects PureSystems can shift organizations from where today they spend 70% or more of their IT budget just keeping the systems running to where they can direct more than half their budget to new initiatives. To that end, IBM initiated an approach it calls scale-in design, which provides for increased density (PureSystems can handle twice as many applications compared to previous IBM blade systems), effectively doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space through the use of expert automation, optimization, and virtualization, and then packaging it at an attractive price. The entry level PureFlex is priced at $100,000 and is sufficiently configured for a midsize organization.

IBM estimates that a PureSystems machine can be running in four hours, one-third the time of earlier IBM blade technology.  If IT did it from piece parts figure on taking weeks or months. IBM calculates PureSystems requires 47% less deployment labor hours and 73% fewer management hours versus conventional systems.

From the standpoint of zEnterprise shops, key innovations—especially the optimization and expert patterns—will likely be incorporated into the next zEnterprise release.  The expert patterns may finally address persistent concerns about replacing retiring z veterans and the loss of mainframe experience.

Also of interest to zEnterprise shops will be the design of the new PureSystems devices. They clearly borrow from the zBX and the zEnterprise hybrid ensemble, including its ability to manage a combined physical/virtual hybrid environment from a single console. They don’t call it the Unified Resource Manager but they could have. Today PureSystems and the hybrid zEnterprise are close cousins. Expect them to grow even closer in the future.

Workload-Driven zEnterprise Solution Edition Program

The IBM Solution Edition (SE) program for the zEnterprise is one of the few true bargains in mainframe computing. It delivers a zEnterprise mainframe as a bundle with software, middleware, and maintenance at a steep discount. It is, however, workload-specific.  It is a great deal only if you can live within the workload constraints of the SE agreement.

To qualify for the SE deal you must use it for a workload new to your mainframe environment. This deal is designed to expand the usage of the mainframe at a given shop.

IBM notes, the SE is tailored to meet specific business needs and designed to enable maximum value from the current IT infrastructure in the fastest possible time and at the lowest cost. The SE program addresses the following specific workloads: ACI, App Dev, Chordiant (CRM), Cloud Computing, Enterprise Linux, GDPS, Security, and WebSphere as well as SAP.

Take the SE for SAP program. The program makes it more affordable for companies to benefit from the strengths of System z for their SAP environment.  If you already are running SAP in a distributed environment you can bring it to the mainframe through SE for SAP or Linux on System z by taking advantage of the System z SE for Enterprise Linux, which is one of the most versatile SE offerings .

Hybrid computing environments also can be accommodated under the SE program. For example, when implementing the SAP with z/OS and DB2 on zEnterprise companies may choose to implement the SAP application server on zEnterprise with Linux on z or on the zBX with POWER7 blades and AIX.  This comes at a higher cost as both the zBX and Unified Resource Manager are considered SE optional products.

The SE program offers a great deal if you can live within the constraints. But as one DancingDinosuar reader writes, “from experience we now know that the reality is somewhat different. The SE contract imposes procurement terms and usage restrictions that detract from the perceived discount relative to the business-as-usual (BAU) price to meet the same business requirement.

For example, software price protection is only guaranteed for the SE term as long as there are no software version upgrades. Version upgrades will incur revised charges. Very few applications, it turns out, are truly fenced in to the extent that this issue can be ignored. Furthermore, since the SE is a bottom-line deal, there is no way to determine exactly what discount level would be applicable in the event of a version upgrade.

Another complaint: SE software is licensed for peak workload. It is highly unlikely, however, in any BAU situation the monthly software charges would be for 100% of the capacity of the machine/LPAR from day one and for every month through the contract period. In a BAU situation, the highest four hour rolling average for an on-line workload typically is less than 80% of the machine/LPAR capacity. It’s wonderful that the z can perform reliably at near 100% utilization, but most shops don’t run it that way.

This manager has identified a dozen or so similar SE gotchas, many arising only when something has changed at the company that requires changes to the z. IBM insists that SE users can add and delete software from the stack, spread workloads across LPARs, and buy more capacity if needed.  Where IBM gets difficult, and rightly so, is when the requested change alters the nature of the workload. “The SE is workload-based pricing and will be the best price you can get for that workload and capacity,” says an IBM SE manager.

Another DancingDinosuar reader balked at the SE qualifying workload notion. The whole concept of a qualifying workload, he notes, is an inhibitor.  Workloads evolve over time.  Furthermore, if you price a z114 to run a certain workload compared to the price of a System p capable of running that same workload, the p likely will be more attractive.  The z only wins when other factors (reliability, fault-tolerance, granularity of virtualization, scalability, etc.) make the premium worth it.

SE delivers a great deal but you must read the fine print closely to make sure you can live within the workload constraints for the 3-5 years of the SE agreement before you take the low price.

Anyone who has considered the SE program and will talk about it (anonymously, of course) please contact me.

zEnterprise Use Cases Start Rolling In

IBM has become more forthcoming with information about the initial zEnterprise hybrid computing users. This is a welcomed development.

These organizations adopted the zEnterprise and the zBX to run a hybrid (mixed platform) computing environment, not just as a bigger, faster z10.  What those organizations are doing—the use cases—is essential information if an IT manager is to seriously consider adopting a hybrid computing strategy.

A few names already have trickled out. EUROCONTROL, one of the more recent, was reported at DancingDinosaur here. EUROCONTROL is the European air traffic control organization. Its goal was to streamline operations and reduce costs. IBM put out a news release on it here, in November. Then in December, IBM unveiled BG Phoenics, a European IT services provider, here.  BG Phoenics turned to hybrid computing—two z196 machines, two zBX cabinets with POWER7 and System x blades in a cluster running Linux, DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, and more to reduce server and management sprawl.

An interesting data warehousing use case is Nova Ljubljanska Bank (NLB), a Slovenia bank. IBM provided the bank with a new z196 and business analytics capabilities. The analytics initially took the form of the Smart Analytics Optimizer but with plans to upgrade to the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA), a blade that incorporates Netezza capabilities. The system also included the zBX, Linux on z, and DB2 for z/OS. The goal was to speed up the processing of financial queries. Complex queries that previously had taken up to 1.5 hours to complete can now be completed in seconds. Check out the NLB video here.

A utilities company that previously ran Power Systems switched to the z196, zBX, POWER7 blades, DB2 v10, and SAP to support growth that would drive its previous production throughput of 80,000 bills/hour to over 150,000 bills per hour. Actually the system turned out to be able to scale above 400,000 bills per hour, more than enough to support an anticipated 30 million added customers over the next 18 months. The z196 was configured with 100 GB of memory, 7 CPs and 7 zIIPs.

So, zEnterprise hybrid computing use cases are starting to be published. Certainly more details are needed, not only on the speeds, feed, and configurations, but also implementation details, the choices that were made, and the organizational challenges that had to be overcome.  Have no doubt, hybrid computing entails significant organizational challenges starting before the machines even hit the loading dock. Also needed is third-party validation. But this a welcome start.  DancingDinosaur is looking forward to more.

At the same time IBM unveiled the recent use cases, it also offered some details on zEnterprise and hybrid computing adoption. For example, approximately 100 organizations took zBX cabinets and over 950 blades have been shipped.  Last fall that number stood at around 80 zBX cabinets shipped. And despite weak sales performance in the Q411, the amount of z MIPS shipped in 2011 still grew 16%. Also, a full complement of zBX blades now are shipping: POWER7, System x blades for Linux and for Windows, and specialized blades like the IDAA and DataPower.

The IDAA is an interesting computing story that delivers startling performance and is only available for the zEnterprise, a situation IBM makes clear is not likely to change in the foreseeable future.  The IDAA enables the zEnterprise to be extremely cost competitive at BI analytics when put up against long time BI leaders like Teradata and Oracle Exadata.  At some point DancingDinosaur will take a closer look at the IDAA.

And just in case you thought the zEnterprise is going away anytime soon, don’t worry.  The trends are headed in the zEnterprise’s favor. IBM added 62 mainframe clients in 2010, 76 new mainframe clients in 2011, and expects to hit 100 or more in 2012. Remember all the pundits over the years who predicted that the mainframe was a dinosaur heading to extinction? Don’t bet against the zEnterprise.

zEnterprise Cost per Workload

Is the zEnterprise is too expensive? That is a complaint DancingDinosaur frequently encounters.  Acquiring a mainframe and putting into useful service is not cheap. The z114 starts at $75,000 but to run workloads you’ll have to spend more.

Usually DancingDinosaur shifts the discussion to total cost of ownership (TCO) or Fit for Purpose (or Tuned to the Task). That puts the cost discussion into the context the full costs, not just the cost of the hardware or into the context of what you’re trying to achieve. And you should be trying to achieve something; nobody buys a mainframe for the fun of it.

John Shedletsky, IBM VP of competitive technology, has been dissecting the cost of zEnterprise, Power Systems, and distributed platforms in terms of the workloads being run.  It makes sense; different workloads have different requirements in terms of response or throughput or availability or security or any other number of attributes and will benefit from different machines and configurations.

Most recently, Shedletsky introduced a new workload benchmark for business analytic reports executed in a typical day, called the BI Day Benchmark. Based on Cognos workloads, it looks at the number of queries generated; characterizes them as simple, intermediate, or complex; and scores them in terms of response time, throughput, or an aggregate measure. You can use the resulting data to calculate a cost per workload.

DancingDinosaur, as a matter of policy, steers clear of proprietary benchmarks like BI Day.  It is just too difficult to normalize the results across all the variables that can be fudged, making it next to impossible to come up with repeatable results.

A set of cost per workload analyses Shedletsky published back in March here avoids the pitfalls of a proprietary benchmark.  In these analyses he pitted a zEnterprise with a zBX against POWER7 and Intel machines all running multi-core blades.  One analysis looked at running 500 heavy workloads. The hardware and software cost for a system consisting of 56 Intel Blades (8 cores per blade) for a total of 448 cores came to $11.5 million, which worked out to $23k per workload. On the zEnterprise running 192 total cores, the total hardware/software cost was $7.4 million for a cost per workload of $15k. Click on Shedletsky’s report for all the fine print.

Another interesting workload analysis looked at running 28 front end applications.  Here he compared 28 competitive App Server applications on 57 SPARC T3-1B blades with a total of 936 cores at a hardware/software cost of $11.7 million compared to a WebSphere App Server running on 28 POWER7 blades plus 2 Data Power blades in the zBX for a total of 224 cores at a hardware/software cost of $4.9 million.  Per workload the zEnterprise cost 58% less.  Again, click on Shedletsky’s report above for the fine print.

Not all of Shedletsky’s analyses come out in favor of the zEnterprise or even POWER7 systems.  Where they do, however, he makes an interesting observation: since his analyses typically include the full cost of ownership, where z comes out ahead the difference often is not the better performance but the cost of labor. He notes that consistent structured z management practices combined to lower labor costs.

If fewer people can manage all those blades and cores from a single unified console, the z Unified Resource Manager, rather than requiring multiple people learning multiple tools to achieve a comparable level of management, it has to lower the overall cost of operations and the cost per workload.  As much as someone may complain that a z114 starts at $75,000, good administrators cost that much or more.

Shedletsky’s BI Day benchmark may never catch on, but he is correct in that to understand a systems true cost you have to look at the cost per workload. That is almost sure to lead you to hybrid computing and, particularly, the zEnterprise where you can mix platforms for different workloads and manage them all in a structured, consistent way.

IBM zBX Blades Cheap (Free!)

T’is the season of discounts, and it apparently applies to the zEnterprise as much as it does to holiday gifts. This deal, however, does not appear to end with the holiday. DancingDinosaur supports anything IBM does to lower enterprise data center costs.

Here’s the deal: migrate competitive workloads to the zEnterprise Blade Center Extension (zBX) and you can receive up to six zBX Power or x86 blades for free. So, replace 2, 4, even 6 HP UX or Linux Systems or x86 servers (remember, there are now Windows blades) and receive an equal number of free Power or x86 blades to run in the zBX. The deal focuses on HP, but IBM staff says it applies to Oracle/Sun systems too. Given a $5000 cost for low end x86 blades, that could amount to a $30,000 discount on top of whatever other discounts IBM will throw in. For high end, more richly configured blade replacements it could come to much more.

Of course, you need a zEnterprise (z196 or z114) and to buy a new zBX to cash in on this. But, if you took a deeply discounted System z under the IBM Solution Edition program you could get in at a bargain price. And if your choice was a z114, IBM also is offering the DS8800 storage system for the z114 at an attractive entry price.

The deals are being offered under IBM’s Freedom by Design  program. IBMer Paulo Carvao details the blade offer here in a presentation titled System z: Delivering on the Promise of Smarter Computing. Check out slide #15.

Even without free blades, the z makes an attractive consolidation play. According to IBM you can consolidate an average of 30 distributed servers or more on a single z114 core, or hundreds in a single footprint. In effect, you can deliver a virtual Linux server for approximately $500 per year, which works out to be as little as $1.45 per day per virtual server. If you are consolidating Oracle servers, the savings in Oracle licensing costs alone would cover a big chunk of the investment.

A dearth of zBX blade performance data, however, has slowed zBX adoption for some. A little performance data, however, has started to trickle in. For instance, some recent results came from an Italian company that moved its SAP workload to POWER7 blades on a zBX. It was able to boost bill processing from 60K per hour to 430K per hour, better than a 7x increase.

In general, IBM blade performance in the zBX should be the same as the performance in its standard blade centers. Actually, it might be a little better since the consolidated zEnterprise-zBX combination can cut down the number of network hops in some situations. And IBM insists zBX blades are priced competitively like its standard IBM blades. And then there are the free blades with a competitive upgrade, with which no one will quibble.

While on the subject of zEnterprise deals, the regular prices of specialty engines continues to be a MIPS bargain, delivering more MIPS for the money than earlier versions. One customer used the increased MIPS from zEnterprise specialty engines to reduce the number of cores the company bought, which resulted in a substantially lower acquisition cost with no reduction in overall MIPS. With the right workloads, this is a very effective cost saving strategy.

IBM Power Systems Winning Streak

With all the attention the zEnterprise has gotten in the past year, IBM Power Systems almost seem like an afterthought, at least in terms of the ink it generates. Back in August, however, IDC noted a rebound in the high end UNIX server market of which Power is a big part. Fueling the rebound apparently is the gradual easing of the recession, which has led organizations to begin revamping their systems, and the Power Systems group has been scoring wins all along.

Whether economic recovery is the driving reason or IBM simply is reaping the benefits of the 2011 refresh of the entire Power Systems product lineup, the Power Systems group experienced a 15% year-over-year share increase and expanding profit margins. It also has cashed in on the mistakes of HP and Oracle to the tune of over 250 competitive displacements, resulting in over $225M of business equally split between former HP and Oracle-Sun customers. In you are interested, click here for IBM’s 3Q11 details.

But the financials, good as they are, aren’t the most interesting Power story. A pair of presentations earlier this year by IBMers Steve Will and Patrick O’Rourke laid out some of the goodies the refreshed platform is delivering. For example, PowerVM can drive over 90% virtualization while VMControl delivers industrial strength automation required to take full advantage of that level of virtualization. At the same time, IBM’s EnergyScale technology can reduce Power Systems energy consumption up to 90%. Meanwhile, IBM also was upgrading to AIX 7, which the company dubbed the future of UNIX. (DancingDinosaur sees Linux as the future of UNIX, but that another post.)

The latest rev of the POWER7 processor offers 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket and up to four threads per core. With up to 4.25 GHz processor speed and an integrated eDRAM L3 cache these systems can fly. And the next rev of the processor already is on the roadmap.

Of course, the Power Systems poster child is Watson, the system built around a set of Power 750 servers that won the Jeopardy challenge. The IBM POWER7 processor is optimized to meet the demands of natural language processing, which is what Watson is all about. The processor can handle thousands of analytical tasks at once combined with massive parallelism in which multiple complex tasks execute simultaneously on individual processor threads. Specifically, Watson used multiple IBM Power 750 servers clustered together, each with four processor sockets containing eight POWER7 cores per socket and four threads per core. And you know the result: Watson won by a mile.

Although the number of Power Systems 750 servers, processor sockets, cores per socket, and threads per core used in Watson may not be your typical Power Systems configuration, IBM insists that the processor was not designed specifically for Watson but can handle a wide range of analytical tasks. IBM already has targeted healthcare, financial services, and call centers as primary use cases for Watson-like capabilities.

The interesting thing about the Power Systems win streak is that it does not include natural language processing workloads. The new wins look more like traditional Power Systems workloads than like Watson. For example, the University of Texas at Austin is attempting to predict river behavior in real time. The system combines river systems data with weather and sensor data to predict a river’s behavior more than 100x the normal speed. The combination of analytics and weather simulation on a Power 7 and generate 100  miles of river simulation in an hour, fast enough for people to get out of the way.

Staples, the office supply superstore, turned to Power Systems running IBM WebSphere Commerce 7 to optimize its website for high volume transactions. Staples saw page performance improved anywhere from 25- 55% with IBM POWER7 Systems, according to the company.

Power Systems can process an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing information in real time. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two particularly intense retail shopping days almost upon us, Staples will want all the performance boost they get from the Power platform.

With the introduction of the zEnterprise and hybrid computing and with the recent announcement of x86 blades for the zBX to fill out the multiple zEnterprise hybrid computing platforms, it is easy to forget that Power blades and AIX also can play in this game.