Able-One Systems Podcast

Able-One Systems Podcast


Podcast with Greg R Lee on Linux on Power

January 15, 2016

 

In this episode of Able-One Systems' podcast we will go over the benefits of Linux on Power. We  will have an informative discussion with Greg Lee, IBM Canada's Linux on Power Sales  Leader about Linux and open source trends, performance and reliability, the  OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM offerings and the future of the Linux on Power space.
Highlights of discussion:
Observations with respect to Linux and open source trends

How Linux is becoming a great skills equalizer in the data centre
How a growing set of Linux hosted applications are finding their way to Power  due to the performance and the reliability of the platform
Cost-savings

Power for its strengths as a reliable high performance database server

Increased interest in open source databases
Cost-saving alternatives for core databases: MariaDB or EnterpriseDB
Power as a great place to run database technologies (i.e. Redis) and many of  these databases are showing a 2x performance gain running on Power

OpenPOWER Foundation

Collaboration between IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan and the  organization has very quickly expanded to over 170 members as of the end of  2015
OpenPOWER is a collaborative development community centered on the POWER  architecture and the goal is to enable the partners to develop computing  solutions that will allow for advances in computing that no single vendor could  accomplish on its own

Adoption rate of Linux on Power hardware

Previously in the POWER5 time frame, we had Linux only Power servers and you  could run Red Hat or SuSE Linux but the software eco-system wasn't growing as  quickly
The steps leading up to how Linux adoption in enterprise is huge today

How clients are exploiting Linux on Power today

Interest in HPC workloads given the announcements made in the realm of  supercomputing
Growth in SAP HANA. Today Power is the only platform that supports  production use of virtual machines for running HANA
IBM blue software stack, Cognos coupled with DB2 BLU technology showed an  82x speed up in report generation
Elastic Storage Server appliance

What does 2016 hold for Linux on Power

2016 year of the workload accelerator
Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface
April 2016 OpenPOWER Summit in San Jose, CA
High performance computing as the CPU and GPU get closer together

To connect with Greg Lee:
Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregrlee

Email: grlee@ca.ibm.com
To learn more about Linux on Power visit:
www.ableone.com/linux-on-power/