The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed
The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed
Posted Sep 18, 2013 7:25 UTC (Wed) by tarvin (guest, #4412)Parent article: IBM Announces $1 Billion Linux Investment for Power Systems
And it generally worked. But when we had a problem with it, we found that IBM's support organization seems completely uninterested in helping us: We had a problem with a "VIO" (management) server which affected a Linux LPAR (virtual server). IBM Support didn't take it seriously, until we could also demonstrate that an AIX LPAR was equally affected. Very disappointing.
Also: Last time I checked, IBM's Spatial (GIS) Extender DB2 did not exist for Linux@Power, while it exists for both DB2@x86_64-Linux and DB2@AIX. And when installing DB2 on Linux@Power, some exotic support software needed to be downloaded from an obscure IBM site, while DB2@x86_64-Linux didn't need this. (Hint to IBM: Being able to use "yum update"-like commands and get the entire OS updated including libraries is one of Linux' greatest features. If your application relies on special libraries, then either make them part of the application, or upstream them and nurse them through the systems, so that they become parts of the Linux distributions.)
In other words: IBM needs to make sure that it's not only parts of their organization who work on this. If it's to be taken seriously, they need to make sure that Linux@Power isn't regarded as a second-class citizen in relation to their other product portfolios.
Posted Sep 20, 2013 23:26 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link]
The announcement doesn't say any of this billion dollar investment will be used to improve Linux on Power, but if it is, it IBM might be able to bring some of this stuff to parity with AIX. But it won't be easy, because getting the open source community to distribute something for you is a lot harder than just putting it into your own code library. Just ask Android developers.
Posted Sep 23, 2013 12:35 UTC (Mon)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
Posted Sep 25, 2013 15:13 UTC (Wed)
by wainersm (guest, #48622)
[Link]
I've done a fair amount of work on IBM Power systems and I'll bet I can explain why IBM Support dragged its feet until you could demonstrate a problem on AIX: IBM has lots more tools available to diagnose the problem when AIX is involved. IBM develops the hardware and AIX in tandem; there are numerous facilities built into AIX and AIX applications that can be used to diagnose and repair hardware (in your case, virtual hardware). There's the AIX error log, which contains messages from the hardware's self-diagnostics that direct IBM Support's procedures. There's the AIX application that runs hardware tests. There's the command from the hardware console that disconnects a device, including getting AIX to quiesce its use of it first.
The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed
The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed
The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed