Re: Pure vs. Power

Compute Node = Blade in the Pure Architecture

First off, if you go pure, you will be doing VIOS to deliver your i on
power boxes. If you haven;t done this before it's an interesting
experience and currently there is not a lot of documentation around.
I've had the pleasure of building an i partition on a p240 compute
node and it was a learning experience all the way until the d-ipl.
Anyone who has done power blades and/ore VIOS will be more familiar
with this than i was.

If you have an environment of ESX and/or Power and/or storage and/ore
intel the Pure is intended to start tying it all together to be
managed from one place. With the exception of storage the other parts
need to be Pure Compute Nodes to be managed by the Flex Systems
Manager.

One of the key intentions seems to be to allow the deployment of
partitions and virtual servers to be managed from FSM/SMart Cloud
Entry to remove the array of engineers currently involved in
provisioning anything in the data centre. The other plank seems to be
a baked-in management network and a hardware network so that FSM has a
secure and always on management network to reduce the network
confusion and disarray where many networks are required.

I don't expect that the pricing would encourage you to go pure on the
basis of one power system. If you were replacing a power and buying a
new storage array and provisioning a virtual server farm the offering
would be more compelling as its the sum of the parts that (at least
supposedly) is where the value it.

For myself I don't see this as an offering to individual customers but
more to high end shops, outsourcers and data centers.Not intially at
least.



On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Smith, Mike <Mike_Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So, after many year I might have convinced management to upgrade our aging Power 5 550 machine. I initally was looking at a four core 740, with two cores for i OS and two to support older AIX workloads. In the end, it looks like it might only be i OS on Power running on two Power cores. With some other projects going on in the division, the PureFlex system is being thrown out as another option. This configuration would have three or four x86 blades and one Power blade running two cores. The politics of the situation has me possibly axeing the x 86 blades and looking at a PureFlex system only with one Power blade. So, I guess what I'm looking for is some feedback on a 740 with 2 cores or a PureFlex blade with 2 cores. Both solutions would most likely be using DASD out of our V7000 system. I haven't seen any configs yet so I can't answer part numbers, memory, etc but I guess I'm looking for an AS/400/iSeries/system I person who might know more about the comparision of t
hese two implementations.

Thanks,

Mike.