More is always better when building an ecosystem and the recent selection of an IBM POWER8 system (S822L) by French hosting and services provider Online to put into its bare metal cloud environment is more evidence of OpenPOWER and IBM ambitions to gain (NYSE: IBM) traction in the cloud provider space.
Online, a member the Iliad Group (ILD:PA), says it is using IBM POWER servers in its data center in a campaign to attract new clients looking for a variety of services, from web domains to Internet hosting. Online offers clients dedicated infrastructures in order to provide powerful outcomes for a variety of applications and end uses including virtual private servers, databases and high performance computing.
“One key thing here is we’re continuing to drive POWER towards cloud infrastructure providers and if you look through their perspective, their clients don’t care what kind of server they are running on. You just have to provide the best TCO,” said Sumit Gupta, VP, HPC & OpenPOWER Operations, IBM.
To the extent HPC activities also migrate to the cloud this is interesting as OpenPOWER foundation leaders IBM, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Mellanox (NASDAQ: MLNX) position the platform as both high performance and low cost. Obviously winning market share against x86 dominance is a daunting challenge. That said the OpenPOWER foundation, now 150-plus strong, seems to be gathering steam.
“We can increase our levels of service to clients seeking a dedicated cloud platform alternative to x86 servers,” said Sébastien Cassier, Team Leader, Online. “We wanted to approach the business differently than in the past. The dedicated bare metal Power Systems running Linux differentiate us from other service providers.”
IBM reports the system deployed by Online into its bare metal environment can support more users at a lower cost than comparable x86 systems. For example, when compared to a similarly configured x86-based server, a Power S822L server can support 1.87 times more MariaDB transactions per minute per core at 40% lower cost, reports IBM.
These are admittedly results based on IBM internal testing of “comparatively configured single system image systems running Sysbench OLTP version.05 @ 32M and are current as of May 29, 2015. Performance improvement figures are based on multiple G2 processes running a 32 million record workload. Individual results will vary depending on individual workloads, configurations and conditions. IBM Power System S822L; 20 cores / 160 threads, POWER8; 3.4GHz, 128 GB memory, MariaDB 10.1, RHEL 7.1, RHEV compared to an Intel x86 system with 20 cores / 40 threads; Intel E5-2660 v3; 2.6 GHz; 128 GB; MariaDB 10.1, RHEL 7.1, RHEV.”
Like everyone, IBM sees the rise of big data throughout computing, and has positioned the OpenPOWER architecture well suited for those workloads. By big data, “IBM means handling both extraordinary large volumes of structured (relational databases) and unstructured (noSQL, Map Reduce) data from which customers derive analytics and insight,” according to the release announcing the Online deal.
IBM also insists POWER8 is the “first processor with differentiated capabilities designed to handle both structured and unstructured data.” Cited capabilities include:
- CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) Architecture with key data capabilities e.g.: a). CAPI Flash Access Efficiency, b). Storage reduction via CAPI Attached Compression Accelerator, and c). Throughput and latency advantage of CAPI Attached Mellanox RDMA Fabric.
- DBMA (dynamic balanced memory architecture) in the form of key capabilities, e.g. a). Internal Processor Data Flow b). Memory Bandwidth advantage c). Cache capacity advantage
Given the growth in membership, the OpenPOWER foundation is shifting emphasis to driving new products based on the architecture rather than member recruitment, said Gupta. “We’re seeing a lot of innovation around CAPI and a number of startups beginning to take advantage of the CAPI interface (to accelerators) to build tightly integrated accelerated analytics.”