On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM, James Freeman <james@quru.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I work for an Open Source consultancy and EnterpriseDB partner in London and have at my disposal for a few months an IBM Power 730 PowerLinux box. My task is to showcase the potential benefits of running Linux on a platform other than x86 and IBM are currently having a big push on their Power architecture boxes for running big data applications on Linux. However there are potentially other applications such as databases which are not currently receiving focus.
I hate to be a downer but I used to run PostgreSQL on Power running RHEL. It was _very_ snappy. I'm told that the performance was way better than anything else that could be purchased at the time. The boxes were expensive (up front and ongoing cost) and the different endian-ness made it impossible to take a snapshot of production and remount it on any non-power machine. We were also afraid of being the only people that ran PostgreSQL on RHEL on Power which didn't help matters.
Some of my problems would have gone away if there was more power adoption and some could have been mitigated with tools that no one had time to write/find. I'm not sure what to do about the price tag complains though:)
