IBM to increase cloud costs in 2024
cio.com
cio.com
This feels like kind of a clickbait article. It looks like single-digit percentage price increases for non-US international customers using IAAS. It's the 25% and 26% increase in prices for flavors of archive Cloud Object Storage.
Which is rather odd - they are increasing prices on the most commoditized products they have.
They're still big but they keep making one unforced error after another. One surefire way to get your customers to research the competition is by such immense price changes. This sort of thing is done gradually unless you are trying to get rid of a certain segment of your customers. Which may well be the case, but if it isn't they have a problem, and regardless you can't really predict how many of the customers you wanted to keep will leave as well. And that's before we get into reputation damage.
If practical quantum does pan out, it will make this current AI situation look insignificant by comparison. It may also become extremely synergistic with the current AI movement. Quantum search will allow for us to seek out global minima across gigantic parameter sets.
> why do this desperate move in their cloud business?
Everyone is jacking up their prices. Microsoft would have to triple our cost before we'd think about tearing up our tech stack and moving again.
Just like pouring water on the floor will find the global minima on it. Just wait until there is one puddle left. O(1).
I am yet to be convinced quantum computers are real at all and not just some slow convoluted variant of an analogue computer.
It's gravity that does the sorting for you, if you want to do this in space at a minimum you will have to have a spinning container and the surface you're interested in had better be the floor.
IBM may possibly be able to recoup their investment in quantum by whale-hunting with the former (and certainly some of the crypto-breaking characteristics will make that quite lucrative to sell to state-level agencies), but it will likely be decades before every company in the world is asking the question "how can quantum help us" the way they are with generative AI.
IBM now is primarily a big IT consulting business (think Java, not zOS), one of those semi garbage shops like HP Consulting, Oracle Consulting, TCS, etc.
They're a 2nd or 3rd tier company as far as job quality and compensation is concerned.
I wouldn't worry about them, these companies will probably outlive the both of us.
Beyond this IBM's core competency is winning government contracts, a niche very few other people have the desire or the resources, or the proper understanding of the necronomicon to enter.
Shit man, IBM will live on for centuries (assuming we get that far)
The poison I'm referring to is the IBM bean counters and lock-in not the software
Am I wrong?
Regardless of what architectures supercomputers use, their use cases are different from that of server/mainframe high performance compute. 8 cores with on-chip AI acceleration running at 5GHz sharing virtual cache, using ~256GB-1TB of of RAM at ~76-304Gbps transfer speed is something a major bank would use. It won't cut it for SoTA atmospheric modeling, molecular modeling, or something like rapid computational chemistry search space exploration. What it excels at is the ability to handle a blazing number of "ordinary" and AI inferenced transactions per second. Then there's the SAP HANA where entire workloads have data fully stored in the gargantuan RAM.
Could I be neglecting to foresee certain trends in technology or industry? Perhaps. What I'm doing here is highlighting that the current niche is well served by POWER and Z. I don't see the current users switching entirely to Cloud - that ship sailed 5 years ago.
Off topic, and I'm sure you are not in a position to comment, but I find the 'Watson' marketing ploy a massive turn-off, it is so tone-deaf that I really don't understand why they keep pushing it so hard.
You touched on a point I meant to add - reliability. Something that sets the Z mainframe apart from the Power server is the unyielding quest for absolutely no downtime (in exchange for compromise in raw compute/memory per drawer vs Power). I believe the quoted number is 3 seconds per year maximum. Because having huge throughput is well and good for business, but lost transactions could really strike at the bottom line with an unpredictable ripple effect. And in the case that a network of major hospitals is using the mainframe - no downtime could potentially save lives.
People asking these questions obviously have zero idea of IBM's mainframe and server business. May be it is worth mentioning, as little as 5 - 6 years ago more than half of HN have never heard of SAP.
Like Lowes. Home Depot might go out of business if the market crashes hard enough, but Lowes is protected as they're a GSA contractor. The Federal government will never let them fail. Too essential.
This is probably just the same strategy ie IBM might have realized that their cloud department is as popular as it will ever be and is now entering the squaze phase of it's lifecycle.
for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.
This course of action is not surprising looking at their net income and profit margin trends:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/net-income
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/profit-mar...
I guess it also could just be due to companies eventually get too big and bloated which causes them to innovate slower.
I think that's almost certain. Even if IBM finds and rewards the rockstars they have and promotes them quickly and gives them special treatment, i'm guessing a lot of them would prefer to work at Amazon or Google. Not only would they make good money, most of their coworkers would be of higher quality as well.
IBM probably doesn’t use Chime for meetings, either.
I suppose for a narrow group of people might prefer IBM, but certainly not the majority of talent.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aws-and-azure-cloud...
Oracle has an always free tier, but it is hard to build much on 1 vcpu and 1 gb of ram. They offer $300 free credits so you can use some services for free until those credits run out, but their servers are at least double the price of others like Hertzner or Vultr and there are even cheaper ones if you are willing to take the tradeoffs.
I thought, why not check out IBM and see if they offer a free tier or credits? And, then was triggered by the "Free credits for Watson!" I don't know if they have a free tier or not, but that ad alone had me walk away. IBM's reputation over the last few years carries forth in my imagination.
Unless you specifically need a lot of bandwidth then no.
Vultr has EPYC 3rd gen behind a more expensive paywall and don't have 4th gen announced yet either.
Hetzner is better, but again 3rd / 4th gen are only available for dedicated CPU plans. It's a bit of a lottery and there aren't many 4th gens in the mix. There is like a 40% performance difference.
So whereas with Oracle cloud you can specifically pick the latest generation and with preemptible instances it's not as bad as it looks. Definitely not 2x.
Oracle will throw away your running VM on free tier no warning.
Mine got thrown away so hard entire account was fucked and I didn't even had an option to upgrade to paid account...
It is still pricing that VM at about $9 per month. I'll play with it and see.
Softlayer is for example, owned by IBM
Starting in 2019 or so, they dropped any ability to manage cloud resources using the Softlayer-branded portal and forced everyone into using the IBM Cloud API/Console.
Because so many vendors decided to jump into this space, and there's a track record of using accounting tricks as a substitute for market success. Azure, for example, is believed to be obscured[1].
[1]: https://www.bigtechwire.com/2023/06/30/microsoft-azure-gener...
I want a solid UNIX ecosystem with power10 to compete with macOS + Arm. I’m tired of there being only one real option for a reliable unix laptop.
There is a reason why it is the biggest survivor from Linux conquest on the server room.
IBM managed to succeed where Sun, HP and SGI, among others, failed.
Ah, I see you like pain.
OTOH, a single SMT8 core (or two SMT4, firmware-defined) consumes about 20W, so it could be possible to manufacture a few-core module that could fit inside a sensible laptop.
My Dells with Linux are quite reliable though, even if not as fast or good looking as the Apples...
They built notebooks and pcs, but sold that to Lenovo years ago, IBM is still a billion dollar company, but I have no Idea what they do.
Personally, they wouldn’t be my first choice. Only if I had a gun to my head
Their offerings could be a little bit better and more orthogonal though - they could offer Linux on POWER as VMs the same way they do with Linux on Z, as well as AIX and IBMi.