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March 16, 2010

IBM partners with Red hat for KVM cloud

Filed under: News,Virtualization — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 6:32 pm

One question: Why?

IBM has bombarded the IT world for years now how they can consolidate hundreds to thousands of Linux VMs onto a single mainframe.

IBM has recently announced a partnership with Red hat to use KVM in a cloud offering. At first I thought, well maybe they are doing it to offer Microsoft applications as well, but that doesn’t appear to be the case:

Programmers who use the IBM Cloud for test and dev will be given RHEV to play with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server images with a Java layer as they code their apps and run them through regression and other tests.

Let’s see, Linux and Java, why not use the mainframes to do this? Why KVM? As far as the end users are concerned it really shouldn’t matter, after all it’s java and linux.

Seems like a slap in the face to their mainframe division (I never bought into the mainframe/linux/VM marketing myself, I suppose they don’t either). I do remember briefly having access to a S390 running a SuSE VM about 10 years ago, it was..interesting.

Deja Vu

Filed under: News — Nate @ 9:55 am

Intel released their 5600 CPUs today, first saw an announcement on Supermicro’s site last night(there’s a dozen or two vendors whom I prowl their sites regularly). I couldn’t help but get a sense of deja vu when it came to new Intel 6-core CPUs. It seems just yesterday^W nearly 2 years ago that they released their first hex core processor, the Xeon 7000 series.  Yeah I know clock for clock these new chips are much faster, new cores, more threads etc. But purely from a core perspective..why might anyone want to go buy one of these new 5600 series systems, with the new 8 core chips coming in a couple of weeks, and AMD’s new 8 and 12 core chips coming at about the same time?

I think Intel got screwed on this one, mostly screwed by their OEMs. That is, many (most? all?) of the large OEMs have adapted the upcoming 8 core Intel chips which were intended for 4-socket and greater systems to run in dual socket configurations, something Intel obviously didn’t think of when they were designing this new 5600 series chip. On the same note I never understood why the 7000 series of chips never made it into dual socket systems, but oh well it doesn’t matter now.

I think short of an upgrade cycle for existing 5500 series systems probably next year(since the new 5600s are socket compatible, and given the 5500s are so new I can’t imagine many customers needing to upgrade so soon), I think the 5600 is a dead product.

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