Hacker News Reader

Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps.

I would happily experiment with one of these at our HPC cluster(a small group at an University), but the idea of talking to a sales rep to even figure out what it would cost puts me off completely, ignoring the licenses for most interesting things to do with the hardware you buy.

I wish t. power boxes were as easy to buy as x86 boxes. Simply configure, get an idea of a price, talk to the distributor and place an order.

View on HN

I worked with a financial trading firm that was interested in evaluating a POWER system. They called IBM, who arranged a meeting our our offices.

From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM.

We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes.

The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details.

Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it.

It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.

There used to be a joke that IBM sales reps don't have children because all they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.

That's really amazing.

Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.

Compaq also used to provide publicly-available "testdrive" Alpha servers that you could just shell into. This was way before the idea of cloud computing was mainstream. A lot of gnu+linux/alpha development happened thanks to testdrive.compaq.com (which is dead now, of course).

This was before the Alpha port of Linux happened; if it had been available instead of OSF/1, we would have done more with the machine.

But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.

In a 30+ year professional IT career I've had exactly three interactions with IBM, and every one of them went very much as you described. How this company stays in businesss I'll never understand.

Big IT contracts and their VAR doing the actual selling.

[edit]We bought our new iSeries (Power9-based) through a VAR this year with an IBM rep helping us with what we actually needed. It was a bit of a drawn-out experience, but overall, I wasn't displeased. It was easier than dealing with some PC vendors (looking at you Dell and HP). I would imagine it will be another 15 years before we have to buy another one.[/edit]

Bingo. Going to an IBM VAR/Partner is really the only decent/sane way to navigate the IBM sales bureaucracy unless you're talking about US$(high 7-figure plus) orders. It's also really the best way to get the best price, because the VAR will work to figure out all the discounts and such a customer might be entitled to. On an IBM sales team, the left hand doesn't always know or care what the right hand is doing.

When I worked at IBM, I usually called in a favor from friends at a local VAR whenever I needed to order something to get a BoM, because even internally the process was opaque.

I had decent experience with an IBM reseller, back in 2005 or so. I forget the exact term. VAR? Solutions provider? Anyway, we were able to get the latest POWER system (POWER 6, I think) and evaluate our AIX-based app on it for about 2 weeks. They even set us up with a small SAN! Unfortunately, the reseller was not terribly skilled technically, so they were unable to configure the SAN. I had to figure that out myself.

A couple years ago, I worked at a company who's ERP system ran on an IBM System i (formerly known as AS/400). At a user conference, IBM had a table setup with a couple sales guys and a pair of servers on the table.

The first one was the latest server that could run Series i. No big deal, we were coming to the end of our maintenance contract and would probably be buying a new machine in the next year or so.

The second one was a 2U, 48-socket POWER server. They bragged about it running thousands of Linux VM's at a time. I found it a bit odd because nobody who would be running this particular ERP software would be running thousands of Linux VM's.

This is why VARs exist

> It’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps.

I've spent some time looking to see if it would be possible to spin up a POWER based VM in the cloud (just out of curiosity really). While it seems possible in theory in the IBM Cloud, it seems IBM themselves is only interested in offering this to their enterprise customers moving to the cloud, focusing it on getting people to move IBM's AIX/iSeries lock-in to the cloud. When looking at it before, I was not able to spin up a POWER VM from a regular IBM Cloud account at least.

There might be a bit more interest in POWER if it wasn't so damn inaccessible but it really is. If the easiest way to get into POWER is paying thousands of dollars to a company retrofitting IBM's decidedly non-desktop hardware into desktop hardware (talking about Raptor CS), your architecture is doomed to wait for all your enterprise customers to move to amd64 commodity hardware. Maybe that is IBM's goal even, I don't know.

I think you can get Power systems on the cloud here https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual...

Ah this seems to be new, thanks! That's exactly the kind of response I hoped I would get.

Unfortunately completing this flow - with the goal to get a temporary shell on a Power system running some Linux distro - requires me to authorize a payment of over 1300 dollars before I even select an image. That's for "reserving" 1 POWER core and 2GB of RAM... As an individual developer playing with this, that's way over my head. I'd understand very high end cloud pricing for that (tens of dollars per hour, I'd be happy to pay that for messing around a little), but this isn't even a cloud machine pricing model. For reference, $1300 is over half the price of getting a Talos motherboard with an 8-core POWER9 CPU you then actually own.

It seems IBM does not have the infrastructure or volume to permit cloud pricing here. I understand they might not have this, but in my opinion they need to work on this to make it accessible.

Completely agree. I've talked many times to some of the folks there and it seems to me the product is not for a developer or hobbyist, which is unfortunate. It is purely enterprise. Thought this will open up a parallel ecosystem for certain applications but IBM does not seem to think that.

I just don't understand how IBM - being acutely aware of what happened to Itanium and SPARC + running a cloud platform themselves - still believes this notion of "enterprise hardware" is the way of the future. Surely IBM was/is even better entrenched in this area than HP and Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu, but come on. POWER has a lot of history in consumer accessible products even. This is just a recipe for fading into irrelevance ever more.

Sounds like a problem that should be easy to find on an org chart.

If you don’t reward good ideas (they don’t even need to be particularly good or novel, just common sense), you’ll have a company trying to grow something that’s reached its peak usage with motivational speeches, very inspiring leaders and good old pressure on employees as a form of local optimization.

It’s extremely easy to find. The problem is the org chart itself. The entire way they run this stuff is not setup to handle the kinds of things we expect (and get) from every other hardware vendor or cloud provider that could reasonably be considered a competitor to them in either category.

Mostly, but I think you could have an org chart and let individuals and teams override it if they find good ways to reuse assets.

I just don't think most companies run this way, maybe it's the military way of thinking of strict hierarchy rather than a market where the best ideas can develop or where you can at least break out of the hierarchy to get something started.

The MBAs and bean counters would probably argue that it's important to get certain unpopular things done, but I think a market would solve that too, as soon as something becomes a bottle neck, someone would step in.

My impression is that organizations are far too centered around VPs and directors who get to carry on without having to prove themselves again in the new situations they're in.

Beats me. Can't believe a company that was making processors for the most picky of all industries (gaming consoles) is now completely ignoring the everyday consumer. Org priorities and financial engineering it looks like.

They've made huge changes since those days, getting rid first of x86 laptops and desktops then servers then chip fab. None of those decisions ever seemed particularly wise to me, especially the last.

The most frustrating part is they made really good products(even if slightly expensive) but somehow didn't follow through on any of them.

What makes you think that IBM sales people and management cares about "the way of the future"?

They care about the quarterly report and right now the best way to improve short-term performance is to milk your existing locked-in customers for as much money as possible.

Because they've just announced the next entry into a series of processors that by all accounts can take the fight to Intel and AMD's best (and has done so for some time), which requires huge investments and long term planning, roadmaps and funding commitments to work. Seems pretty committed to long term thinking to me.

At a guess you are not the target audience and this up front commitment is their way of filtering you out.

If any management/exec thought of this filter, they are idiots. I'd imagine if they made these as accessible as x86 servers to me - a humble sysadmin, and I could prove by data that our legacy Fortran scientific application can run faster on it than the newest Intel servers (it most likely would, given SMT differences, higher memory bandwidth, wider cache lines, more efficient 7 nm process, higher clocks etc) I'd recommend to my boss to spend our annual compute budget on these boxes instead of the Intel servers because that one legacy application consumes a lot of our HPC compute capacity. My boss and I would happily pay IBM to give this critical application a boost. Too bad, IBM filtered me away.

Agreed. Lots of companies have this 'call our sales department' strategy prior to giving you any information at all. That's always been a great way to lose my business, and indirectly the businesses for which we consult. But that's perfectly ok with me. If a company is not willing to list their prices up front then that's a good indication that they are not competitive.

Besides that, some of the atrocities that I've seen IBM and their partners commit are a good warning that you want to stay far away from them. Lest you be Watsonized and made dependent on marketing-masquerading-as-technology.

The last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) you could configure and price at least some categories of POWER servers on IBM's website much like you can with Dell or any other x86 vendor. The big difference though was in the amount of sticker shock when you see the bottom line price.

Very much agree. When IBM acquired Red Hat I really hoped they were going to get serious about cloud. They still might, but at least for now me as an individual guy just can't play with their hardware. I admit I'm quite impatient and I get irritated when any amount of red tape blocks efficient allocation of my time, but I don't think (given how easy it is on other cloud platforms) it's too much to ask for if you want to be taken seriously as a public cloud offering.

There are other options (1 is offline being upgraded this week)

https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/

Each of these do some filtering because they give out resources only to find people bitcoin mining. Also, a good number of experimenters give up on the first obstacle they encounter or aren't really well-versed in benchmarking / architectural differences (lots of folks running microbenchmarks). There are some incredible resources available (many free) for those looking for a partner and not just a box. Good luck in finding the right partner for your projects.

Of course I'm not. My entire point is that filtering out average Janes like me is antithetical to the long-term interests of POWER, and extremely weird for a cloud platform that allows you to spin up an amd64 VM in a few seconds for a few cents. You're left with an audience that has to use POWER (either because legacy or their purchasing colleagues thought it somehow was a good idea), not an audience that actually wants to.

It speaks volumes to me and says that IBM knows perfectly well that they are not interested in cost conscious customers but only want those for whom the IT department is a cost center and not a core strategic asset.

That's why you'll never see a Netflix or a Whatsapp on IBM infra. But banks, insurance companies, medical companies etc are still large contributors to IBMs revenue streams. If your idea of software development is agile teams and capable programmers churning out code to power your business then you're not an IBM customer or even a prospect.

If your idea of software is 5000 programmers as interchangeable cogs in a machine with an annual release and three month acceptance cycles then IBM is where you'll probably end up.

I understand that is how IBM thinks. I just don't like that they only think this way, as it feels like spoilt potential. IBM has all the pieces in place - they have great technology with high performance, ppc64le actually has pretty good apparent support from mainstream Linux distros, infrastructure and languages (for a non x86/arm architecture), and they have full "creative liberty" of where they focus their platform. It would be an awesome option to have for cloud infrastructure, but they keep it all to themselves.

They could be using that to do what AWS does with Graviton2 - cost control their completely integrated stack and make it a competitive advantage. Sell more performance per dollar despite having a non-amd64 architecture. Use it to give everyone more choice and competition. But instead they mostly use it to lock in their old (or new?) enterprise customers. The irony is that these two models could easily coexist, but they don't seem to understand the former and understand the latter very well.

And I can't help but think the latter is a losing model, as my strong impression is that the movement in the enterprise is away from "enterprise hardware", and towards commodity hardware. IBM needs to work on becoming commodity, in my opinion.

Oh, you are totally right, it is spoiled potential. But they've been doing this for so long it is impossible for them to change. Hence the very long and slow slide to the bottom. I'd see the Maffia change their tune before IBM ever will, way too much institutional inertia.

I know some of the IBM story from very close and it takes a certain attitude to even want to work there.

What's funny about this is that it used be be true - Whatsapp started on Softlayer, and didn't move away until Facebook bought them.

If IBM had even just kept pace and stayed behind AWS with Softlayer after they acquired them, they would have a healthy cloud business by now. It might be because I maintained a system on Softlayer both pre and post acquisition - so I was really close and able to see what was happening - but they squandered a huge opportunity there.

Ah yes, that's true, they in fact were hosted there at some point. I couldn't have picked a worse example :) Or; in a way it is proof that IBM is a bad choice for companies that operate at scale and are low margin and data heavy. Hosting costs must have been a substantial fraction of operating costs for Whatsapp (obviously, long after personnel).

To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based systems at a smaller hourly price.

edit: oh hey, you're ahead of me :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185759

> To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based systems at a smaller hourly price.

Well besides the fact that 1) IBM is the only party with both the capabilities and interest in making high performance Power based products [1], and 2) evidently does not understand how to (or why to) invest in bringing this to a general audience. I don't really care if they would do this in IBM Cloud or with other cloud infrastructure companies, but they don't seem to be doing either. In addition 3) why would other parties be interested in running Power when they can run amd64 or arm? It certainly doesn't look to have a price advantage...

IBM really needs to shepherd Power well - they're the only ones that can do it. But I can't help but thinking they seem to be leading it to the grave despite apparently very capable engineering.

[1]: And why would anyone but IBM go for Power at this point if they can have ARM too? An open license matters very little when compared to ARM's mindshare and momentum.

As it is, POWER is on a slow decline towards irrelevance by focusing only on milking their existing enterprise customers as long as it lasts.

Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else.

If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.

How would filtering out potential developers benefit a platform’s viability? My imagination isn’t sufficient to envision a market situation where this could ever make sense. Can anyone here describe a hypothetical scenario where as a company pushing a platform you want less developers interested in it?

It could be your going about it a bit wrong. IBM does have trial POWER cloud instances. Or at least they did a couple years ago, as I managed to get my hands on one through the IBM developer program.

OTOH, getting into the developer program requires talking to their sales/marketing droids too. But, if your a software OEM or have a SAS product, they were (are?) hungry and actively doing their best to recruit companies to their platforms. So, you spend a couple hours answering their questions, and in return you get some pretty steep hardware/software discounts and they will loan you machines.

Doesn't GCS over Power as a platform? Likely to only deep pocketed customers but iirc they did a partnership a while back.

yup -- not turn key at all -- "contact sales" but it exists: https://cloud.google.com/ibm

There is also this: https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...

Well in our case (Fortune 500) we have iSeries and pSeries systems built on different generations of Power. They just aren't consumer grade machines out there, or better put commodity priced machines.

When your are already invested it is far safer to stay with what works for you. My downtime is measured in hours per year and all of it has been scheduled across the last seven years; that was the last time we had an unscheduled outage. You can achieve this will all types of hardware; well maybe not all types; but it is easier with some than compared to others and expectations are certainly much higher.

We joke at work that we get forgotten all the time because our daily ready for business meetings; all groups reporting in; never see us mentioned except to state plans for upcoming quarterly maintenance. A pleasant state to be in

> My downtime is measured in hours per year (...)

This is probably a bit picky since you don't mention what those machines do, but that's not even "four nines" in the high-availability scale. I'm not sure that's something to boast about for a Fortune 500 company or any kind of praise for the IBM series. Maybe you meant hours over the last seven years?

Not op but it sounded like it was scheduled downtime so perhaps it was meant as a per-system number and either redundancy kept the availability higher or the service wasn't needed when downtime was scheduled (overnight, weekends, etc)

Planned and scheduled downtime usually doesn't count against SLO/SLA.

If the "hours per year" is true, they're actually achieving 100% uptime.

Fucking big deal, if you ask me.

Juelich Supercomputing Center has a POWER9 system which I was able to experiment with. A lot of interesting differences from 4 way SMT, 128byte cache line size to faster main memory bandwidth and multi GPUs.

In the end, it was great but not magical, so the difficulty of acquiring offsets the benefits IMO.

I have a 1999 IBM Multiprise 3000 and I learned that the processor has a 256-byte cache line which dropped my jaw when I read about that. Sadly, I can't get the Service Element software so I can't actually do anything with it.

Try https://www.integricloud.com/ it's the cloud of Raptor (the power workstation builder)

It's really cool they're making this, I should give this a try. This does look like it's the most accessible way of getting a POWER-based shell. This service's interface does not start out with making a great first impression though unfortunately, but if it's the only realistic option then so be it.

Top UP? ¿?

Why making it so difficult to navigate? Just give resources an price.

I have to invest so much effort into an infrastructure I don't even know If I'd like to have.

Presumably this helps them plan out capacity better. Not everyone can have the extra slack that AWS has.

If you wanted to try ppc64le, you could reach out to OSU's OSL Lab. They have Power8/9 machines and you could build your software and possibly arrange some time for PoC.

https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/

There are also these https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

Also you can build for ppc64le if you are, or become, a developer for a GNU/Linux distribution. Unfortunately getting ppc64le back online for Fedora copr has no ETA, but you can develop and build for Fedora/EPEL. I can't remember whether SuSE's OBS has it.

You can also run under qemu, but I don't know how solid that is, and there is at least one simulator.

Yeah openSUSE has ppc64le builders. I think there are openSUSE ports to ppc64le, but they definitely exist because we support SLE on ppc64le.

(Disclaimer: I work for SUSE.)

Raptor sells power9 servers. You can buy one to tinker with for ~$2k. Presumably, they will sell power 10 too.

It looks like it will be a few years before they have that https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026

That seems a bit disappointing. It might suggest that IBM is backtracking on their openPOWER approach.

Do you know about Raptor Computing? [1] Some of those are affordable and all of them are configurable. Maybe they'll support POWER10 in the future.

[1]. https://www.raptorcs.com/

Raptor Systems’s POWER9-based Talos system immediately came to mind when I was reading this. I definitely hope they’ll be bringing out a POWER10-supporting successor. The experience is now pretty perfect, even for the supposedly dicey desktop environment (provided you keep in mind that there’s a lot less hardware present than you might’ve come to expect: no integrated graphics, no in-built sound, even disk and network controllers can be a bit dicey). Their initial offerings had some notable teething problems, that I shan’t waste more pixels going into (I’ve railed against them and turned in their favour, so I shall let it rest with my partisanship and convert’s fervour). It’s certainly worth considering if you’re into exotic hardware and/or are super-security conscious AND are willing to pay some extra money beyond what you’d expect for comparable x86₆₄ commodity builds. Well worth hoping for and looking into.

Looks like about 10k USD for the POWER9 recommended config

https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html

That’s true, but if you base the system on the smaller BlackBird motherboard (as I did) you can go much lower. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

You might also not need the Radeon WX7100 Pro, if a consumer level graphic card is enough there are sevaral options: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/POWER9_Hardware_Compatibility...

The more you’re ready to do-it-yourself, the more you can save. You absolutely need the motherboard and IBM chip, and then you can get other things like memory, storage, graphic card, etc. used for much cheaper. Only the memory is a bit special as it has to be registered, but because of that you might be able to find good deals since it can’t be used in standard desktop computers.

You can get more performance for the same price with AMD/Intel, but for those interested this platform is not that out of reach. I use it as my workstation and I’m happy with it.

How much is ‘much lower’? I would love to build a workstation for myself using PowerPC. Would it run AmigaOS?

Blackbird™ Mainboard (Board Only) Order online for $1,310.99 Current Status: Backordered

Not unreasonable. $500 for the 4-core processor or $800 for the 8 core. Basically what you would have paid for a decent system decades ago, without adjusting for inflation.

“Much lower” is still quite expensive compared to a mainstream platform: the absolute minimum if you already had all the other pieces would be the motherboard and CPU bundle for $2,133.77: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html

That’s 8 cores, which since Power9 has SMT4 means 32 threads. The 4 core CPU bundle is a bit cheaper but when you add the 2u CPU cooler its price gets very close, so it’s not worth it unless your computer case is too narrow for the 3u (≃15 cm clearance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_unit) cooler included with the 8 core CPU.

It won’t run AmigaOS unless on an emulator[1], and then you’re better off with AMD/Intel: you would lose more performance in emulating the CPU, but you would get more raw performance for your money anyway.

[1] https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,75.0.html

If you want to run AmigaOS software natively on PowerPC your best option is a PPC Mac running MorphOS. It even runs on the PowerBook G4: https://ddg.co/?q=morphos+powerbook+g4

Or if a well-integrated emulator suits you better, take a look at AmiKit: https://www.amikit.amiga.sk/

I don’t think that this CPU would be a net advantage for those use cases. I did use Amiga computers even as Commodore went bust, hanging on, but the approach I’m going for now is FPGA implementations: https://misterfpga.org/ http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=preorder

I’m in the waiting list for Vampire4 Standalone, but for now I’ve got a MiSTeR.

So no, don’t buy a Power9 hoping to run AmigaOS on it any better than on a mainstream PC.

P.S.: the $1310.99 price mentioned by aww_dang must be from a few months ago, the current price displayed in Raptor’s website is $1732.07. Prices went up due to the current COVID-19-induced crisis, which also made Raptor cancel their upcoming Condor platform (ATX Power9 but LaGrange-based: twice the memory bandwidth): https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html

P.S.#2: for those in Europe, Vikings (https://vikings.net/) has been trying for a while to offer them here and they might be able do so it soon: https://www.talospace.com/2020/08/vikings-upcoming-openpower...

P.S.#3: used BlackBird with 8C Power9 for sale in Germany: https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,153.0.html

There are some issues with Power10, although Raptor hasn’t revealed them yet until they clarify things with IBM: https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html?show...

You can buy POWER9 boxes without talking to humans. With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations.

[1] https://raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html

> With any luck, Raptor will integrate POWER10 into one of their upcoming Talos[1] workstations.

Not for a while: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1295364416469377026

If you run an HPC cluster, I'd have thought you have to talk to vendors as a matter of course, but I assume there's no point yet. At least one UK vendor will sell you AC922s (POWER9), I guess as one-off, if you wanted.

True, I do talk to many vendors related to hardware purchase. But, it usually is about the hardware I want, after I already made up my mind about what fits into our budget and matches our need. IBM is usually not even in consideration because I cant even get a ballpark estimate of what these things practically cost (I can get some $ figures from Googling forums but it is not really of my interest).

To give you an idea, I can log in into a local vendor's website, for example, https://www.atea.dk/eshop/products/?filters=S_sr650 and quickly get an idea of what an SR650 Lenovo rack server would cost me. My configurations would obviously change the cost, which is where I talk to the vendor to get the real costs.

That's not how IBM works or how they have ever worked. The whole idea here is to put you in touch with their sales organization who will put some effort into determining what the best way of fleecing you is.

But if you want a small GNU/Linux POWER system, you don't talk to IBM, surely. Ours came from OCF in the UK; they might even operate in Denmark. You won't see a price on the web site, but realistically you don't expect a list price from Dell for your x86 server systems -- at least in my experience. If you talk to them nicely, they may give you an evaluation unit. We once paid £1 for a potent Interlagos system that didn't go back.

I'm not saying talking to sales people is necessarily a pleasant and easy task, of course, especially as you typically need to know more about it than they do.

"Consultancy"

The only place I have heard about POWER being used in Denmark is at the military, but I guess it exists elsewhere as well. Though I could see that the big orders in the public sector comes through procurement. Compared to private companies asking around.

Banking tends to be a big Power user. I bet even in Denmark that's true. :-)

https://www.ibm.com/products/power-system-s922/pricing

The time to talk to sales reps is a real problem. I was at a startup, and this was a factor in pretty much all of the software we selected. This was a financial app- we needed messaging of some sort. I called the leaders at that time, Tibco, 29West, etc. They all wanted to schedule meetings 3-5 days in the future to just talk about what we needed. My expectation is that we would have something basically working in 3-5 days. This is before we started haggling over contracts and pricing and all that.

We ended up using ActiveMQ, and literally that evening I had things talking to each other. No contracts, no hassle, just downloaded and got to work.

A bit more on-topic in regards to IBM though- we buy licenses from them directly, and the past few months they have sent kind of bizarre emails saying I could save money if I bought them through a third party partner. I just forwarded the mail to the finance guys, but I can't imagine why IBM would introduce a middle man into our relationship with them and how that additional layer in between could end up saving us money.

IBM does channel sales. They don’t want to maintain a sales force. They want to maintain channel partners and VARS. They will discount you because they need your money flowing thru VARS to keep everyone happy in their ecosystem. So they need to incentivize everyone to go through their partners. So they will charge you more if you are direct to them.

> They don’t want to maintain a sales force.

Wow, I didn't realize their culture had changed that much. They were a sales oriented company since the days of Thomas Watson Sr.

They had and have a large/enterprise customer sales culture. There were few SMB sales for IBM back in TWSr's days (how small a mainframe do you want? Still costs a mint.)[1] and now that IBM has SMB product to sell, they aren't interested in the building out a sales org to address that market[2]. So they've done what almost everyone else has done and outsourced that to a channel.

[1] Yes I know IBM used to sell everything down to the pens and pencils, but virtually always to support some very expensive other purchase. [2] Yes I know IBM has things called "SMB sales" or some variation. From my experience at IBM, they were either targeting some specific product/market combo, or they were a bad joke; not exactly the A-team. YMMV.

Many big B2B sales orgs are all channel or heavily channel now. Just the way it is these days.

I don't know what the plan is for POWER10 but POWER9 systems are available from other vendors than IBM. Notably this company: https://www.raptorcs.com/.

The systems are still quite expensive, but likely within the budget of a University research lab.

I've begun to think having to "contact sales" is an anti-pattern that actually hurts gross sales in the long-run.

I've recently tried to engage with EventMobi, a company that supports virtual events.

I'm ready to spend thousands if necessary.

However:

#1: There is no way to just sign up, which is off-putting.

#2: Requesting a demo just put me in their funnel with canned email messages. And after over a week, I have yet to be contacted by a live human, despite sending emails.

I feel companies leave a lot of money on the table by not having some sort of self-driven onboarding.

Sales reps are humans. They get busy. Forget to call back, etc.

I feel like there should ALWAYS be at least some sort of self-driven flow at the low end. Even if sales are required at the high-end.

Otherwise, it seems, money is always being left on the table.

The "low" end is often grossly unprofitable (or, frankly, aggravating) to the point of dragging down the product and the support personnel.

I don't know if it's accessible to everyone, but IBM does have a cloud offering: https://www.ibm.com/cloud. Their bare metal offering doesn't seem to include Power processors though: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com