Would you put bicycle tires on a new car? I keep hearing that analogy, and I like it.
When I was much younger and much less well off, I sort of did that, only instead of a bicycle, I made life more difficult when I bought used tires for my car. This wasn't quite as foolish as choosing gas over oil, but bear with me.
A tire shop in town took in old tires when they sold customers new tires. Then they'd resell their used tires to poor kids like me. The shop charged $5 per old tire. That sure seemed like a bargain at the time, but I soon learned that you get what you pay for. My "new" old tires had no tread and wouldn't hold air. Then I'd spring for more $5 tires. While occasionally I'd find some tires with a little more life in them, it wasn't long before I concluded that I should just spend the extra money up front. Once I started purchasing new tires, my tire problems went away.
Now, instead of a car, think about your computers, and instead of tires, think about the operating system or applications that you run in your enterprise. Then ask yourself, why do people go with cheap computers and free operating systems?
Sure, they're less costly up front, and we might be able to download an OS and get them to run on commodity hardware. But by taking this route, are we putting bald used tires on a fancy new sports car? Are we so focused on the cheap initial investment that we overlook the total cost of ownership (TCO)?
I like enterprise class servers and enterprise class operating systems. In the case of Power Systems, I like knowing that IBM designed the hardware, designed the hypervisor, designed the operating system, and is there to support them all. If I have issues, help is a quick phone call away. If I need to escalate an issue, I can easily gather an army of IBMers to help solve problems.
If I'm running an application that supports my business, and I need application availability, why would I want to buy used, worn tires?
Recently on Twitter, fellow Power Champion Andrew Wojnarek (@andywojo) said that Linux is free only if your time is worthless. I don't want to go that far, because Linux has its uses. But assuredly, if given the choice, I'll always choose AIX over Linux.
Of course, there are those who believe that Linux on VMware is good enough for their needs, as you can see from the comments on this post. What do you think?
I think this is a key point with AIX on POWER. IBM knows every piece of hardware that their OS is going to run on, because they built it. This integration makes a huge difference in overall availability and compatibility.
This type of integration is the reason I think Apple has done well with it's products. The OS and hardware for Macs, iPhones, iPod, iPads, etc. are all made by Apple.
Posted by: Michael Potter | December 20, 2011 at 12:55 PM
Hi Rob,
Regular reader 1st time commenter: as much as I love AIX & power[its been my bread and butter for 15 years]I can see its age is coming to an end. The software needs to accommodate for failure(think hadoop etc) not ECC,HA and other expensive/complex, gold plated hardware measures. The largest p7 system runs Linux already(www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/10/0322Linuxselected.html). How many p795s do facebook,google,ebay or amazon buy? google have mapreduce workloads running on hundreds of thousands of nodes, thousands of nodes die and the job keeps going...all in software-try that with Systems Mirror. The FOSS community has more developers than IBM. As much as I hate my VIOS skills(and pay rates)going down the drain with my SP2/PSSP skills...its gunna happen to me ...and IBM unless we adapt....
http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/jul/25/why-cities-keep-growing-corporations-always-die-and-life-gets-faster
.....or I could be wrong...meh
Keep up the good work and have a happy hoilidays
Posted by: Chris Rutherford | December 20, 2011 at 08:22 PM