As requested.

"countdown to very predictable Jesper IBM benchmark squealing in three... two... one.....)"

Zero.. Been busy got a new job, moved from operational to strategic. Actually what I found out on some of the work I've done internally to cut cost, is that we make very very little money on x86 offerings. Their short lifespan, combined with the cost of setting them up and pulling them down. Also the software costs per capacity unit is terrible.

The ones we have the best client satisfaction, and we also make a good profit on, as we can leverage the the fact that we have a lot of smart people, for example I think we have one of the best teams of Solaris sysadmins I've ever seen, is UNIX. So we like UNIX. Clients are happy, we are happy.

But we don't like the small UNIX machines, has to have a critical size, and then use a shitload of virtualization. Cheapest UNIX box in TCO, for us, is still the POWER 770 if used right. Now if the client will be content with containers on Solaris, then we can also make a bit of a sweet deal there, although the HW kind of sucks. But let's see how "T3+" turns out. If it has decent single threaded performance then that will be a good thing for our Solaris offering.

"(he even had a hosting company in Denmark that was looking for a complete PA-RISC SD32 - any ideas, Jesper?)."

Actually that could be us, we have no PA SD's on the 'Spare list '. We do on the other hand have quite a lot of Large Last generation SUN boxes like E25K's and older. Even an old Starfire. They need to go to a broker. Otherwise it's mostly massive amounts of HP/IBM/SUN/DELL blades and 1-4U servers.(And I was actually asked by a client team about the performance of the PA 8900 versus Tukwila, and what it would cost to do a migration project from PA->Itanium)

I was also asked to give my 10 cents on the new SD2. Lets just say that the our client architect was quite choked that it was based on a reengineered c-7000 BladeSystem chassis. Not that I was trying to put it down or anything, but I'll put it in the same class as the power 7[7/8]0, which in technology it actually has quite a few similarities with. So we'll have the reverse story now, IBM used to peddle the 570's against SD's, and now HP will peddle SD-2's against 795.

But IMHO it's not in the power 795 class. Sorry.

Good thing about the SD2 is that is much cheaper in TCA than the old SD, which is good. But.. still when we do proposals POWER normally just comes out on top and with POWER7 it's really a nobrainer, HP needs to get their virtualization layer up to speed. Or at least what their sales teams are ready to do with it.

But with regards to the Whole x86 versus the Big UNIX iron. then our UNIX servers normally, looking at the serial numbers, can have a life of at least 5-10 years, going through several generations of upgrades. One of the new POWER 770's in our 'cloud' actually started out as a 1.9GHz p570 back in late 2004, and had almost 3 years of life as a POWER6 machine. And we also have HP UNIX gear that I can say the same about. But x86 is a buy and throw away thing. And the TCO is just terrible, cause client teams are just interested in TCA. They push the cost in front of them, trying to push it to the guy that is going to replace them, when the cost hits them.

// Jesper