> Is it compelling? Not sure - depends on licensing terms, co-location costs, what are you doing, energy costs, AND compute power.
It seems like Linux always wins in terms of licensing, so does it currently lose in any of those metrics?
Also, since Linux runs on IBM POWER systems, it looks a lot like IBM's AIX has very little place to stand: Even if the hardware is better (which, judging from experience with other proprietary workstation vendors like Sun, I'd be surprised about) the value proposition of running Linux as opposed to a proprietary OS with less effective support and expensive licensing appears insurmountable.
So, I'd be willing to believe that IBM's hardware is better in some ways, but I'm more skeptical about IBM's software in a realm where an apples-to-apples comparison is possible.
You run the IBM power stuff mostly because it is the most cost effective way to run Oracle and other CPU licensed workloads. You can’t use VMWare partitioning to avoid paying. But the IBM hardware based stuff allows you to segment the workloads.
The other thing is that like mainframe, you can lease CPU on demand. So if your business is cyclical, it may be better to increase CPU November-January by 20%.
POWER is supported on linux to the point where it runs, but it doesn't come close to fully leveraging the hardware. AIX does. Stuff like hardware accelerators, transactional memory, hardware counters, reliability monitoring and self healing, etc. Lots of stuff left on the table because it doesn't perfectly overlap the x86, and it would be a massive undertaking to correct that in the kernel. You'd think that wouldn't be the way it is with IBM and RH... but I suspect there are some market segmentation ideas informing those decisions.
My company still runs a lot of stuff on AIX (also mainframes for that matter) and the reason is that it was set up that way in the 90s and no one feels like investing the sizeable amount to move these business-critical applications over to Linux just for the sake of it. Unlike all the other unices that were formerly used here (HP UX, IRIX, Solaris, Super-UX and others) you can still get AIX support so there is nothing forcing the hand of this migration. I expect them to still run some stuff on AIX in 10 or 20 years. Nothing new will ever be deployed to AIX and probably hasn't been in 20 years. At some point the AIX systems will only be around for a handful of niche things and at that point the cost of migrating those over might become lower than the cost of paying IBM off.
I mean, you'd have expected that of Solaris and Sun's hardware, too, but that didn't make Solaris on Sun workstations compelling enough to actually survive. That argument seems like a variation on one of the myths mentioned in these posts:
In short, I'm not sure IBM Power machines have any special hardware, and if they do, I'm reasonably sure Linux supports it. It is, after all, a smaller and more stationary target than the weird crap that ended up inside and hooked to commodity PCs that Linux ended up supporting.
Sun abandoned the workstation space well before Oracle finished abandoning SPARC and Solaris.
As for special hardware, the processor drawer of an E1080 looks a lot like the one of a z16 (without the distributed virtual cache of the Telum, or the insane water cooling blocks):
It seems like Linux always wins in terms of licensing, so does it currently lose in any of those metrics?
Also, since Linux runs on IBM POWER systems, it looks a lot like IBM's AIX has very little place to stand: Even if the hardware is better (which, judging from experience with other proprietary workstation vendors like Sun, I'd be surprised about) the value proposition of running Linux as opposed to a proprietary OS with less effective support and expensive licensing appears insurmountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerLinux
So, I'd be willing to believe that IBM's hardware is better in some ways, but I'm more skeptical about IBM's software in a realm where an apples-to-apples comparison is possible.