IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 servers can reduce energy consumption by 75%
ibm.com
ibm.com
>Compared 5 IBM Machine Type 3931 Max 125 model consists of three CPC drawers containing 125 configurable cores (CPs, zIIPs, or IFLs) and two I/O drawers to support both network and external storage versus 192 x86 systems with a total of 10364 cores. IBM Machine Type 3931 power consumption was based on inputs to the IBM Machine Type 3931 IBM Power Estimation Tool for a memo configuration. x86 power consumption was based on March 2022 IDC QPI power values for 7 Cascade Lake and 5 Ice Lake server models, with 32 to 112 cores per server. All compared x86 servers were 2 or 4 socket servers. IBM Z and x86 are running 24x7x365 with production and non-production workloads. Savings assumes a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.57 to calculate additional power for data center cooling. PUE is based on Uptime Institute 2021 Global Data Center Survey (https://uptimeinstitute.com/about-ui/press-releases/uptime-i...). CO2e and other equivalencies that are based on the EPA GHG calculator (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...) use U.S. National weighted averages. Results may vary based on client-specific usage and location.
It's apple and oranges anyway because I guess if you consider this you have different priorities but I'm skeptical that x86 couldn't come close in terms of performance/watt
Nevertheless, for certain workloads this IBM server might have a better energy efficiency, when they can exploit some of the many accelerators that exist in the IBM server, for offloading some tasks from the CPU.
Intel pursues now the same strategy, because the soon-to-be-introduced Sapphire Rapids cannot beat AMD Genoa in a CPU vs. CPU competition, Intel stresses now the advantages offered by the accelerators that they have included in Sapphire Rapids, following the traditional IBM model.
"Reduce energy consumption by 75%" sounds like exactly that sort of, "Remind the customer to call their other vendors to schedule an appointment" situation.
A _cool_ story nevertheless
But in general you're pumping really cold or really hot air into a room and doing only a partial air change and the blower is supposed to stir the room up to even out the temperature. I had to look it up because I wasn't sure, but the amount of humidity air can hold is in fact a curve, not a flat line. So if you mix one unit of very cold air (below the dew point) with four units of ambient air (also below the dew point), it does seem like the dew point of the resulting air might be higher than the temperature.
Some server rooms get too dry and moisture has to be added back in to prevent static discharge damaging electronics. That might be the sort of thing he wouldn't have been aware of but was part of the equation.
There's also the possibility that he was fucking with me.
Anyway, if everything is working properly, you more or less get a fixed delta T between the inlet and the outlet of the air handler while the system is running.
If you eliminate a lot of the heat load, your inlet temperature might not get as hot, also even if it does get as hot when the A/C is off, when it turns on, it may cool down much quicker and then you may overcool; especially if the A/C has a minimum cycle time.
As you say, when you cool air, the humidity capacity drops. Most air handlers have some capacity to remove humidity, but it's no absolute. If you drop the temperature too much, relative humidity will be really high and it will condense on all sorts of surfaces.
The AC unit pulls the humidity down as it cools (actually it _has_ to remove the moisture first). Which means that _all_ the excess humidity/condensate goes down the AC drain from the evaporator which will be 20-40F (more or less, depending on system/etc, it might be more) cooler than the inlet. If you live say in the southern US and have ever had to use aux cooling in a datacenter you will be shocked at how much you have to empty the condensate collectors. Even on fairly small units you can fill up 55 gallon trash cans in a couple hours.
AKA even if its way overspeced you won't get a relative humidity > 100% which is what is required for everything in the room to start condensing.
So, if the outlet is really cold, and the humidity/room temp is high you can actually get a small amount of visible condensation as the cold air blows into a hot humid room, but I've never see that stuff manage to get more than a foot or two before it turns back into vapor. Basically a tiny cloud. Which would be how you _might_ get some condensate on something.. If your blowing the cold air against something (or its discharging up through a raised floor vent into a machine cabinet) and the humidity is high in the room it might be possible, but this is why you either mix the room/ac air first, or you seal the cold isle/machine cabinet/floor to avoid cold->hot leaks. If the AC is flowing from the cool/dry side through the machine the machine even if its not heating the air much will just raise the temp, not the humidity. Which lowers the RH in the room.
Also, the condensate on a machine room window, will be on the _outside_ where its warmer/wetter because the window is _cooler_ than the outside ambient.
Also, unless there is a huge air leak in the room, the machines will act like a heater, and the room will tend to have a fairly low relative humidity. AKA the AC will pull out the moisture for a given temp, and the machines/walls raise the temp of that air, so you have air with low relative humidity.
So, the only way the room starts to condense is if a bunch of external warm+humid air is added to a room, but that can happen independent of how much over/under cooling is happening. Running a perfectly setup room at say 70F, and throwing a the doors open to 100F 95% RH air and replacing the air faster than everything in the room can warm up will condense.
I'm on the west coast. Now in the Seattle area with A/C, and the air handler in the basement (which conditions the basement and the first floor) will form a fair amount of condensate where it's supposed to, but it can also form on the outside of the duct work too... Although the basement isn't super air sealed. So I'm just saying most of the condensation happens where it should, but not all of it. Of course, my basement isn't a machine room, either. I've only got a couple computers down there, and they're low power.
This stuff is run through attics and the like all over the southern US where the attics are at ambient humidity levels, and I can't remember the last time I saw condensate forming on one that was properly sealed with mastic. In fact it would probably be a problem if it was because it would be dripping through the attics into the drywall ceilings. R8 doesn't sound like much, but its apparently enough to keep the outside of the duct from feeling cool at all.
> There's also the possibility that he was fucking with me.
That too. I've seen parents do this over random things. I hope not to (I don't want to betray trust) but I may be tempted one day if my kid is being willfully ignorant over something that matters.
> Starting at $135,000 USD*, the single-configuration LinuxONE III Express is designed as a new cost-effective offering for the most popular workloads, including data serving and Red Hat® OpenShift®. IBM internal tests show that a 12-core IBM LinuxONE III Express server running WebSphere and Db2 workloads requires 18.7 times fewer cores when compared to x86 servers and delivers a 57% lower TCO over three years.
They go one to explain their benchmark in the footnotes. I don't know how to translate from IBM units to something that an organization with a mortal-sized checkbook would already be using, though.
These marketing materials basically need an IBM decoder ring, and its on purpose because if they just published the TPC-C/$ numbers everyone would be able to compare the machine vs the competition, and it likely wouldn't look good. So the benchmarks are contrived the same way apple was contriving altivec/photoshop benchmarks in the early 2000's. Sure with this one benchmark the machine is 10x faster than the competition but for these other 99 benchmarks its 1/2 the speed kinds of thing.
I'm sure buried in the IBM license there remains a restriction on publishing benchmarks.
Which maybe at some point I will post my own personal results running on an older machine when I don't think IBM would be able to trace me... but that said, lets say, in the past these numbers were cooked in such a way that the absolute top of the line machines were roughly equivilant to a mid-range x86 server available for about $40k. Now that said, if you can use all 40TB of redundant ram, and your workload needs 100 PCIe slots that it can only drive at about 1/100th of the total bandwidth (aka you need them for connectivity with the ability to burst at line rate) then sure, the zseries can come out ahead. But frankly your probably doing it wrong if you plug in 20 100Gbit adapters that average 10Gbit each.
I'm guessing a large part of the posted efficiency of these machines comes from the ML accelerator they now have, which gives them the ability to optimize some ML+DB type of workload that requires a big fat nvidia GPU under normal circumstances but doesn't make good use of it (or they are just comparing it to a x86 without a GPU...).
If you’re the CIO of an insurance company or whatever, you roll something like this into your mainframe renewal.
This way, IBM can overprovision L2 cache and "not worry" about it going unused. Remote L2 cache is slower than local L2 cache, but its still SRAM and should still be faster than DRAM to access.
You fit in with their schedule, not the other way around?
But!! No shutdown needed.
(A fancy insult, now that I think of it. Nice.)
They have zeolite in the rack (like in the ISS). The food is also non methane producing.
Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure, they'll fail over and someone will show up to replace what failed. Enterprise tech is sometimes cool.
Gosh you are right i always forget him.
>Seriously though, these machines call home when there's a hardware failure,
HP's EVA Device did that too, so sometimes a Engineer calls you and ask's if "we" have time to update the firmware, not even HP engineers are allowed to do EVA updates...just specialized EVA ones.
Indeed, even when they have publicly listed prices, it's usually possible to negotiate a substantial discount by dealing directly with the sales team. Like 50% is often possible.
It is a shame though. IBM has no idea how to sell to anyone other that gigantic megacorps - which, fair enough, but they could probably pick up a lot of sales to medium-sized businesses if they weren't so old-fashioned about everything
It's much more like placing an order for an container full of severs based on an reference design from an OEM then going to HPE or Dell for a commodity x64 system.
It's companies who don't treat ANY of their IT as anything but a "Someone else deal with this, oh, and never let it fail".
Of course, all of these companies also have x86 servers that run the customer facing web apps and stuff. You really wouldn't want to waste your MSUs running web servers, although I'll admit I don't know if these new Linux mainframes are charged by rolling avg MSUs or other MSU metrics. Traditionally, Linux on Z has had more favorable pricing due to the ability to use IFLs and basically just declare that a cores MSU usage doesn't count towards your licensing since it's been locked to only running Linux.
Then you have half a mainframe of capacity lying about, and why not run some linux workloads on it.
I find it _really_ hard to believe that outside of a few really narrow niches anyone is really buying mainframes to run linux workloads. Its just not cost effective.
PS: and then of course IBM gets to add it to their total "sold capacity" for the quarter to make it look like the business is growing. So they _want_ you to use all that idle hardware.
AIUI, Oxide Computer is targeting the "private cloud" space which is sort of adjacent to this stuff and could easily intrude on it. Of course they're based on AMD EPYC hardware, but the rest of the system is custom designed for ease of management and reliability.
The thing that recent grads(weather engineering or business) tend to miss here is that for a lot of those organisation the central mainframe system and the organization's policies and culture is pretty entangled to the point where you cannot just replace either.
[1] on time, on budget and without leaving some aspects of the old system running under some sort of virtualization.
That's interesting; any chance you could give the background on that or point me to more information?
Nah, there are a ton of businesses of all sizes across the world with many man-years of effort put into writing software that runs on various layers of the IBM stack from Cobol on up.
For one regional grocery store I know of they started in the 70s. Let's average 10 developers on staff churning out 4GL, Cobol, and whatever else since 1979. I hear it runs webservices now to serve the desktop and mobile client apps.
10 engineers * 43 years = 430 man-years put into a pile of software highly customized to exactly how they do business, from corporate & accounting to the warehouses to the ice cream factory to the industrial-scale bakery to the retail stores. Every single process at the company driven by mountains of custom software. The thing that knows more people buy Texas Toast at Store #473 so it prompts the manager to order extra and the bakery to put an extra Texas Toast run into the already tight schedule? Yeah that runs on the IBM mainframe... because that's where the cash register sales data goes and where the managers handle orders and where warehouse tickets are printed and where the bakery solves the traveling salesman problem to create schedules around quickly expiring products (did I mention the delivery truck schedules also run on the mainframe?).
If we assume it would "only" take 10% of the effort to replace, mythical man-month is not a problem, and you can handle dual-running the integrated systems for the decade it will take to perform the swap... you saved a year of your on-staff developer's salaries while putting every part of your business at risk of exploding (and ceasing all improvements to the existing stack lest you chase a moving target)... and you end up with something more or less equivalent except on commodity hardware.
$1m for IBM hardware? $5m? $10m? Pfffffffttttt... Chump change. Where do I sign the check? Sold and sold. Don't even bother sending a rep out.