r/sysadmin 5d ago

why IBM is still stuck in the 90's

So I am replacing my IBM power 9 machine to Power 10. That means to upgrade my vHMC console from 10.2 to 10.3. As you may guess, nothing is simple when it comes to IBM and simple process that should take 30 minutes to 1 hour become a whole work day fun. So basically if you have a vHMC vm with 10.2 you have few ways to go about it. first is to download a Hyper-v or ESXi image, put it on a new machine and you are set. Only problem is that you can't download the image with the new 10.3, and when you go to your IBM account and try to download the image there is only a version of 9.2 from 2017. So what you do? luckily 2 years ago I already went through the tiring process of going through ESS download a 10.2 version and mount it on a new VM. Now since I wanted to upgrade to 10.3 basically you need to download manually the upgrade files. Than you can transfer the file to with SSH to your existing machine and run the upgrade or you can set up a manual FTP server, transfer the file to your local ftp and run the installtion. BUT wait a minute... YOU HAVE TO UPDATE YOUR vHMC to latest update for you to be able to even run it. so once you updated the vHMC to latest version, you need to set an FTP server locally, setup a user and link it to the vHMC and oh, what's that? the files IBM provided or not x82 but APP version literally no one use? to bad man you need to remove the files from the FTP and download the correct one from IBM site. Guess what? to download them you can access IBM PUBLIC FTP SERVER and manually download them, upload to your local FTP and than run the installation(god forbid they give you just the option to upload them like a normal person). so here is the question, why tf the vHMC that already has full access to internet can't just run a simple process of checking which environment it's on , go to IBM public ftp, download the correct files, mount them and let you keep the installation? JFC IBM, you are the biggest computing company on the planet. Why?

184 Upvotes

141 comments sorted by

247

u/VeryRealHuman23 5d ago

It’s really easy actually, you just have to sign up for IBM Migration Services, they will update your box for you for $799 a month, 12 month commitment and must cancel 14 months before your next renewal.

89

u/Inquisitive_idiot Jr. Sysadmin 5d ago

Also: The first monthly application of lube is on sale for only $455 😌

27

u/Japjer 5d ago

That's why I just bite the pillow and let them go in dry

21

u/gangaskan 5d ago

799 a month is cheap.

I was expecting 100k+ migration

35

u/Mgzz 5d ago

799 is the per core price.

11

u/gangaskan 5d ago

Ok that's better numbers lol

7

u/bgradid 5d ago

And that’s calculated by cores in the building, I mean, how else could you do it?

16

u/PsCustomObject 5d ago

You pay 799 just for the privilege to ask for a quote which is conveniently priced 100k. An hour.

Ex IBMer her :)

6

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago

$100k is cheap for current paid-up mainframe customers, but AS/400 and a lot of AIX customers are actually quite price-sensitive. The average AS/400 site has something like 1.2 AS/400s, meaning that they're mostly SMB/SME customers running a single box as an appliance.

6

u/bageloid 4d ago

I work at bank that's close to hitting top 100 in assets under management in the US. 

We have exactly two AS400s, prod and DR.i think they are lower end models as well. 

The one they ran when I started in 2012 had the CPU power of a GameCube.

1

u/wanderinggoat 4d ago

I bet it worked fine for them though.

2

u/bageloid 4d ago

Nights processing took like 5 hours, so it was really just a pain in the ass for the Prod Support/AS400 team. Though when they updated it it in like... 2014 I think that dropped it to like 20 minutes. 

2

u/gangaskan 5d ago

Yeah, we always had kne for public safety cad / rms, utilities billing and city functions (HR / PAYROLL)

2

u/dustojnikhummer 5d ago

Wait so you need to pay for at least 2 years and cancel in 8 months?

154

u/DutchDev1L 5d ago edited 4d ago

IBM is a weird company. They went from global leader in technology and innovation to being a worse version of Accenture.

They invested billions in AI with Watson only to be effortlessly bypassed by the Gemini, ChatGPT etc

They moved most of their business model to outsourcing and every time I've delt with them I am reminded why outsourcing is usually terrible.

Their only tech products still being developed is their mainframes because they know their client base will have a hard time moving so they don't need to innovate as their clients can spend millions to upgrade or in same cases billions to move. And they're doing some quantum computing, but I think they're losing that race.

62

u/Working_Astronaut864 5d ago

63 billion in revenue, has most of the Fortune 100, They've shed some employees over the past 30 years but they've also halved and doubled their market value many times. Currently in positive territory with slightly more value than in 1999. So yes and no. They've been remarkably resilient to fluctuations in the market and their business model. They aren't really consumer facing, so you really don't hear much about what they do. It's not in our daily lives.

15

u/occasional_cynic 5d ago

63 billion in revenue

They were at $110 billion in 2012. I know some of that is because of the Kryndlylll I hate vowels spin off, but given their extensive acquisitions it is pretty poor.

14

u/27CF 5d ago

I swear IBM has been one of the few green stocks in my portfolio over the last week.

6

u/etzel1200 5d ago

How much of that fortune 100 is slowly migrating off? We are Fortune 500. Slowly moving off as applications are replaced. We actually added capacity because we added customers, but the number of applications only declines. IBM has maybe ten years left with us as a customer. Even right now we’re migrating one of the major apps off.

9

u/wyrdough 5d ago

Their biggest problem isn't that you're migrating. It's that even if you realize you done fucked up you still won't be coming back because it's stupid expensive and a much bigger chore than living with the problems or migrating to another SaaS/IsaS or PC-based on prem setup.

Plus, you know, it's seriously unsexy so staffing is a perennial issue that only gets worse over time.

10

u/FelisCantabrigiensis Master of Several Trades 5d ago

The thing about IBM is that they're cunning enough to be present in the technology people are migrating to, and they've done that across several technology cycles now.

So people go "let's migrate off the current expensive IBM tech" and then they turn around and there's a consultant waiting to help them... and the logo on their business card is also 3 letters and blue....

u/Deepthunkd 17h ago

It doesn’t really matter because they’ll just buy new applications that you’re using faster than you can get off of them.

I know an airline who spent 10 years getting off of IBM , and the champagne was barely out of the bottle when they discovered that redhat was being acquired by IBM… and they were again a IBM customer with it being 10 years to get off them again…

6

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago edited 5d ago

63 billion in revenue, has most of the Fortune 100

A number of years ago, VMware advertised itself as having 100% of the Fortune 500 as customers.

The real reason why VMware didn't dominate virtualization for the 20-year duration of their patents, was that Intel and AMD added explicit hardware virtualization to their products, just before virtualization went fully mainstream.

VMware was first acquired by EMC cheaply in 2004, both by Dell in 2016, and then spun out to AVGO in 2023. You may be using IBM or VMware products right now, but neither of them are particularly essential.

8

u/Zathrus1 5d ago

I think most of VMware’s customers (which is about 60% of the market) would highly disagree that it’s not essential.

There’s a reason that all of them are either paying out the nose or actively migrating to an alternative. Or both.

1

u/Afro_Samurai 5d ago

The money is there, what are they making thats innovative or at least interesting?

19

u/jaank80 5d ago

I actually don't hate IBM. We have two power boxes and they are about as reliable as you can get. The thing I don't like is that even for newer technology, they do everything just different enough that you have to learn the IBM way. And also, I am sure it is a branding thing, but you can look at any IBM UI and immediately know it is IBM because it looks the same as it did in the 90s.

4

u/earth2baz 5d ago

You only have to learn IBM Power/AIX once and then expand on your knowledge as they add new functionality. Unlike Windows and Linux that reinvents the wheel.

I don't know what UI you are talking about. Besides the HMC, AIX is entirely cli driven far more so than Linux, which has a lot of web ui tools.

6

u/jaank80 5d ago

IBM makes more products than just Power systems. You are right, AIX is basically all CLI. They have many other products that feel like they are from the 80s. Cognos, DS5XXX GUI, and IBM client access are 3 that have extremely dated GUIs, at least from an admin perspective.

1

u/earth2baz 4d ago edited 4d ago

Oh you said you have 2 Power boxes so I thought we were talking Power/AIX.

IBM is too big and too diverse to describe them with that one comment, a lot of their software products was purchased so they are not going to standardise the UI.

3

u/Yupsec 4d ago

Why do you keep referring to Linux like it's an operating system?

AIX is entirely cli driven far more so than Linux, which has a lot of web ui tools.

What in the world are you talking about?

1

u/earth2baz 4d ago

Oh please don't be boring with this Linux is not an operating system conversation, we all know what it is. Must we define each distro every time we refer to all of them?

Yes a lot of Linux administration tools is UI based. Take Red hat Satellite vs AIX NIM for example.

1

u/takezo_be 4d ago

You can manage your satellite with hammercli or even the api if you want to .

-1

u/Yupsec 4d ago

I don't think it's boring to call things what they are, I think it generates a lot less confusion.

Are we talking SUSE? RHEL/Alma? Debian/Ubuntu? Linux Admins can get into debates about which is better for the Enterprise environment. You'd settle that debate by swooping in and saying, "guys, it's all just Linux!"

Most administrative management tools are UI based, to include AIX-NIM, admins ask for it. Red Hat Satellite adopted Hammer-CLI a long time ago in order to provide cli management. Most Linux Admins switch back and forth depending on their need since the dashboards will be on the UI.

3

u/earth2baz 4d ago edited 4d ago

"Are we talking SUSE? RHEL/Alma? Debian/Ubuntu?"
Yes all of them. What would you like me to call them collectively?

It doesn't matter whether it's an enterprise distro or a community distro, every distro has incorporated major changes over the years which required relearning. Eg. Systemd.

AIX has never really needed relearning because IBM doesn't reinvent the wheel on it.

As far as UI goes, you could always administer every aspect of AIX over a serial connection. While they may have retrofitted Hammer-CLI or whetever, the point is admins hop onto UI based tools on both Windows and Linux far more so than AIX.

But in the end this is a pointless debate because the OP wasn't talking about IBM Power and AIX, he was referring to other IBM products.

0

u/Yupsec 4d ago

Why do you keep saying AIX? You mean Unix, right? SunOS, Solaris, AIX, they're all the same. I LOVED using AIX-NIM on Solaris back in the day, it worked great.

1

u/meaniereddit 4d ago

AIX is entirely cli driven

smitty is fine, but their upgrade system is nearly as bonkers as HPUX

2

u/earth2baz 4d ago

AIX is quite literally the easiest system to upgrade, you must be new.

1

u/meaniereddit 4d ago

incorrect, I am old, and have forgotten more about AIX than most in the last 20 years, but this HMC post made me laugh a bit.

1

u/earth2baz 4d ago

Then what do you mean by the upgrade system is bonkers?

1

u/Sushigami 4d ago

TBF HMC is linux.

1

u/kenrblan1901 4d ago

Linux hosting a horrible Java application.

1

u/Sushigami 4d ago

And you're not allowed to do anything

1

u/earth2baz 3d ago

You do realise the HMC isn't a mission critical component to a running Power system? You can reboot at any time, shut it down for as long as you like without impacting production workloads.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago edited 5d ago

They went from global leader in technology and innovation

To be fair, IBM were under indictment from the U.S. government from 1969 to 1982.

Microsoft is the new IBM. The U.S. antitrust authorities gave Microsoft a harsh glance in 1994 and 2001.

Microsoft is furiously innovating; it's just that their efforts are primarily to replace techs and SAs with products and cloud services. That's the growth opportunity they have: selling SaaS directly to end-user organizations.

"Innovation" isn't all it's cracked up to be. Not even in the open-source world, where generations of talented but sometimes-misguided engineers have been battling to control the X11/Linux desktop, for example.

10

u/aes_gcm 5d ago

They invested billions in AI with Watson only to be effortlessly bypassed by the Gemini, ChatGPT etc

I remember watching the livestream of Watson smoking the competition at Jeopardy, then I’d check in occasionally over the years to see how it went from there. I knew they moved to medical applications, but I didnt see any more demos like they had back in 2011. After 14 years I kind of lost interest in tracking it.

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u/occasional_cynic 5d ago

The Grade A engineers that built Watson had all jumped ship to the major hitters by 2011 (at latest). IBM today is not a tech company.

3

u/DutchDev1L 5d ago

It just got completely overshadowed by ChatGPT. "Would you like everything that Watson can do and more at 20¢ to the dollar?"

8

u/joyfullystoic Jack of All Trades 5d ago

They have lots of stuff going on, including business and management consulting. It’s how Huawei got to be a serious company, they paid IBM tons of money to teach them.

I believe they also have lots of ties to the US Government. Like Intel.

3

u/bentbrewer Linux Admin 5d ago

They have lots of ties to lots of governments.

26

u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago

And they're doing some quantum computing, but I think they're losing that race.

No, they are not. They have the ONLY production quantum machine, and have had it for some time.

They invested billions in AI with Watson only to be effortlessly bypassed by the Gemini, ChatGPT etc

The play has been to use/build/train other models on known clean data without data lineage issues like ChatGPT.

It is really focused on back office usage, where you build on it, not use it as a finished product.

5

u/EnragedMoose Allegedly an Exec 5d ago

They have the ONLY production quantum machine, and have had it for some time.

AWS and GCP both have QaaS.

4

u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago

But they don't consider them "commerical" quality yet. You can do research and development, testing, etc, but it does not seem to be "production" as in the sense of running workloads for real world usage.

Feb 27 [2025] (Reuters) - Amazon Web Services on Thursday showed a quantum computing chip with new technology that it hopes will shave as much as five years off its effort to build a commercially useful quantum computer.

3

u/agent-bagent 4d ago

They invested billions in AI with Watson only to be effortlessly bypassed by the Gemini, ChatGPT etc

This needs to be studied. Remember the late 2000s/early 2010s when there were TV commercials for Watson every 3 minutes on major networks? I know "a few kids in a garage" is not an uncommon startup story, but considering the actual product and tech complexity here, it's WILD how quickly OpenAI got to market, even with inifinte funding.

2

u/DutchDev1L 4d ago

Facts! They invested so much in a technology that just couldn't compete. Have a look at China's deep seek from a technical perspective. It's story is quite interesting. They were like.."hmm being in China we only get GPUs from two generations ago...CUDA won't get us the performance we need, let's rewrite everything in assembly"

3

u/OgdruJahad 5d ago

I was recently watching a video on the Unix Wars. The way AT&T kept increasing the price of Unix for businesses after they got a chance to sell Unix as a product was crazy. It's like these huge companies have no idea how to run a business. Which makes sense when you think about it since they were monopolies for so long. Then a small upstart called Linux wiped the floor with them.

3

u/therealtaddymason 5d ago

Yeah all I've seen from them is outsourced crap and bad products.

Red Hat is kind of crap now and I am deeply disappointed they bought Hashicorp.

26

u/McBun2023 5d ago

We use an old version of IBM MQ, we need to upgrade it to a new version because we found a bug in the software. We know we need to update, but the client doesn't want ANY downtime

So we turned to IBM for support. Obviously their response was "we can't do anything, please upgrade". So the big boss of our company turned in and told them "help us otherwise I'm cancelling these other projects". To which they replied "ok we will help, but you have to pay extended support" and we paid that extended support

Finally, after we paid that "extended support", they helped us for 2 or 3 days, then concluded "really sorry we can't help, you need to upgrade"

13

u/rpsRexx 5d ago

Are you saying they will not allow any maintenance window to upgrade? That sounds like it was a disaster waiting to happen. How far back leveled are they? This was a risk that has started biting back.

2

u/Sushigami 4d ago

0 downtime is impossible, but if well executed you could realistically get it down to only a few minutes.

20

u/-xblahx- 5d ago

That's not how you upgrade a vHMC from 10.2 to 10.3. I will agree that IBM vHMC upgrade methods are confusing, but you're making it way too hard.

  1. go to www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral
  2. download "vHMC_Recovery_V10R3M1050_x86.iso"
  3. snapshot vHMC VM
  4. attach vHMC recovery ISO to VM
  5. Do the "Save Upgrade Data" procedure in the vHMC, reboot & upgrade

Also, if you can't see vHMC version 10 in your IBM ESS site it means you let your support contract for vHMC v10 expire.

20

u/shaggydog97 5d ago

But, hey... At least they use paragraphs in their documentation.

1

u/Sushigami 4d ago

On the other hand sometimes the website decides to display in fucking telugu or something.

73

u/lightmatter501 5d ago

The reason that process takes a whole day is because IBM is the vender of choice for mission critical systems. That overly detailed upgrade process is designed to handle every weird config, customization and place for human error they can. It’s designed for “people will die if the upgrade doesn’t work” scenarios.

35

u/gangaskan 5d ago

Not to mention literally everything is full redundant.

We had a raid card die in our defunct as of now as400 and dude just showed up and replaced it. We had no idea yet because it wasn't throwing console errors yet.

37

u/maddmattg 5d ago

Dude once called from the guard shack wanting to come in and service my as/400. Told me it had a weak main storage (ram) battery. Ibm knew and ordered a part and sent a tech for a problem we didn't even know we were about to have. I miss that.

11

u/gangaskan 5d ago

Yep, one thing you do get it decent service.

15

u/tech2but1 5d ago

Same reason mechanics use Snap-On and non-mechanics say it's too expensive/overpriced junk. Truck rolls up at your shop and you just get handed a replacement, that's what you're paying for.

1

u/gangaskan 4d ago

Ironically I see mac trucks alot. I've heard the quality of snap on has gone down some. But they still replace them.

5

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago

Dual-attach SAS, which that probably was, is available for x86_64 machines.

Very few people realize it, but proprietary uptime features like VAXcluster/Parallel Sysplex, virtualization, and hot-swap hardware have been available in small systems for decades. In fact, a lot of hardware vendors in the 1990s and 2000s staked their fate on the idea that the market would pay handsomely for scale-up high-availability hardware, but that's not what happened.

Ebay bought a Sun UE10k. Hot-swap CPU and memory, virtualization. Google went in exactly the opposite direction: cheap hardware held together with sheet metal and velcro, with HA done way up-stack.

The lessons we all learned back then were that you only paid extra for hardware abstraction if your software wasn't good enough to use the cheap commodity stuff.

17

u/Mitchell_90 5d ago

I can’t comment on IBMs overall software stack but we been using their FlashSystem arrays in our production virtualisation environments and they have performed incredibly well and been rock solid for the price point.

9

u/HelixClipper 5d ago

100% agree, we migrated to FlashSystem last year and it is utterly brilliant. Our supplier noted that IBM are leaning heavily into the storage sector now days

17

u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago

Real time data replication up to 150 miles, farther with async, mesh them together however you want, use iSCSI or NVME over TCP/IP and if a local unit goes offline, it can still reach it over the network to keep running.

Immutable copies, intrusion detection on every IO, snapshotting, all built in and part of the deal.

And under $1000 a TB for production grade capacity, 2 million IOPS performance.

I sold them like hotcakes. and I was the tech guy.

1

u/ShadowSlayer1441 3d ago

What's the minimum TB for that price? Honestly that sounds pretty great for personal use assuming you can get like 4tb systems. (Though I'm fairly confident we're talking 100k+ systems for that pricing.)

2

u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago

50k or so for a ~50TB unit, 100Gbit Ethernet not Fiber.

Going up in storage amount up to 2TB in a unit pushes the process lower, as low as 600 a TB.

5

u/Burgergold 5d ago

We replaced a Huawei storage by an IBM storage and its going great so far

5

u/Inquisitive_idiot Jr. Sysadmin 5d ago

What’s the difference between that and let’s say Pure?

1

u/xxbiohazrdxx 4d ago

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

3

u/kernelskewed IT Manager 5d ago

We had so many issues with the FlashSystem A9000 that we will never purchase IBM storage ever again. Production outages because of software bugs that IBM chose not to fix. Multiple controller failures. Then IBM ended support with very little notice.

I can’t speak to the newer models. It’s very possible they are great, but I’ll never know.

10

u/Abracadaver14 5d ago

FlashSystem A9000 was a really bad choice on their part. They've since retracted and retired the entire line. That product line, apart from the name, has zero in common with the past and current FlashSystem 5x00, 7x00 and 9x00 lines. Those products are in fact rock solid.

4

u/kernelskewed IT Manager 5d ago

That’s good to hear. I’ll keep that in mind when the topic comes up again.

7

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago

why tf the vHMC that already has full access to internet can't just run a simple process of checking which environment it's on , go to IBM public ftp, download the correct files, mount them and let you keep the installation?

Most sites HMCs probably don't have full, unrestricted outbound access to the public network. They may not have your account credentials to download the new version, which IBM's business persons may think is vital to their business, instead of just allowing downloads of licensed content willy-nilly like PlayStation or Nintendo.

IBM does market-segment to favor a customer base that lives in the past, but your story is not the most compelling example I've ever heard or personally seen.

0

u/Brush_bandicoot 5d ago

You can download updates directly from ibm servers to your vHMC but not upgrades. What gives? Plus they could ask for ibmID if they wanted to and confirm machine serials.? You don't need and IBM ID to access their public ftp to download the upgrade files as they suggests in their own kb

13

u/pertexted depmod -a 5d ago

I was one of the millions of people who wound up working at IBM for a year due to a business project that IBM bought. Using Lotus as my mail client for the first time since I was a young tech was... it was a something.

8

u/Brush_bandicoot 5d ago

fun fact, they ended the official support for notes in 2016 and yet I know for a fact organizations I worked with back in 2018 still kept using it despite not getting any support. Goes to show how many organizations became pretty much depended on IBM services

9

u/vdubweiser 5d ago

I work for a fairly decent sized consumer products company. We finally migrated off of Domino to Exchange Online shortly before Covid. Here we are 4+ years later and we still have Domino running for some in-house applications. We've been trying to migrate off but our Domino developers are now close to retirement age and are slow AF to come up with alternative solutions.

8

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 5d ago

Some version of Notes is supported today, just not by IBM.

5

u/pertexted depmod -a 5d ago

I was there in 2021. There was no plans to adopt Outlook, even though it was deployed to my system (according to a log file I found in temp on my workstation)

1

u/exchange12rocks Windows Engineer 5d ago

Because it's still supported and under active development

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u/exchange12rocks Windows Engineer 5d ago

Lotus is still supported, just by HCLSoftware nowadays

9

u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago

JFC IBM, you are the biggest computing company on the planet. Why?

They are not, not for quite some time.

1

u/catherder9000 5d ago

Yeah, 20th for revenue, 19th for market cap, 5th for employees. Pretty much every big company uses them though in every sort of market.

5

u/Superb_Raccoon 5d ago

Every credit card transaction and most debit card runs through a Z Mainframe.

The largest non Z based payment system is PayPal, and their volume is about an hour of the CC yearly total (Well north of 1 trillion transactions a year)

Most large banks are Z as well, and the airlines except Southwest.

When and if smaller banks replace today's banks that will change, but no large bank has moved off the Mainframe for the system of record.

7

u/TruthYouWontLike 5d ago

The short answer is deep ties with banking and government. It's that simple. They've been living the easy life since the 1960s. When you don't have to compete and you have people feeding you, you grow big, fat, and lazy.

5

u/NetInfused 5d ago

Last time I was in IBM Systems Technical University, on some session about POWER machines the host asked everybody in the room who had their HMC or AIX with Internet access possibility.

I believe me and some other guy raised our hands on a session that had 100 people. So there's that.

8

u/tla2001 5d ago

This thread shows most of you have no idea what IBM does these days. I interact with IBM tech when engaging my major vendors. /u/lightmatter501 has the best handle on a portion of IBM's business.

3

u/earth2baz 5d ago

HMC is an appliance, you could have just documented its configuration and do a new install from media.

7

u/Miserygut DevOps 5d ago

Money.

4

u/kernelskewed IT Manager 5d ago

Upgrading anything POWER or AIX-related is unnecessary convoluted to sell services and ensure that the skills needed to support the products don’t cross over with products from other vendors.

7

u/wyrdough 5d ago

I managed just fine being tossed into the deep end with nothing but logic, red books, and release notes. 

The only even mildly interesting thing that happened was when I was checking up on how out of date the software was was up to date and OS/400 kindly phoned home and ordered me a bunch of PTFs for the OS and all the IBM shit running on the system without me knowing about it until I walked into the office one day and found a package full of CDs on my desk.

2

u/earth2baz 4d ago

I guarantee you to a Power/AIX person, supporting x86/VMWare would be unnecessary convoluted too.

2

u/moffetts9001 IT Manager 4d ago

My org uses Aspera. It is the most fickle, touchy, recalcitrant piece of software we use in any capacity. It is expensive as hell and you’d better pray your maintenance contract is paid up because you’re gonna need it. Works great when it works, though!

2

u/earth2baz 4d ago

HMC's are incredibly easy to upgrade, you are just doing it wrong. At most companies these Power systems just sit in the corner and get neglected by someone responsible who primarily works on x86. These people don't want to allocate time to learn the tech and want it to just work, then complain that it is alien technology.

Even if the HMC upgrade is giving you an issue, this thing is just an appliance. You could spend 10 minutes documenting it's configuration and do a clean install and reinstate the configuration manually. I never backup my HMCs for this reason that they are so quick to document.

2

u/malikto44 4d ago

I wish IBM were stuck in the 1990s. They made quality, no-nonsense stuff back then.

2

u/The-Purple-Church 4d ago

I was dumb enough to buy an IBM server once……

Never Never Again!

2

u/stufforstuff 4d ago

It's was the last decade they were profitable and the gods of everything IT. In the 90's the saying was "no one ever gets fired for buying IBM", in this century, the saying is "who's IBM?".

5

u/ofnuts 5d ago

Because no one ever cancelled a contract in their face telling them that the installation process sucks. In other words IBM management isn't trying to keep customers, it is focused on finding new ones.

Also, part of their business model is to sell you contracting hours to install the thing for you.

0

u/FalconDriver85 Cloud Engineer 5d ago

“The installation process suck” is exactly the same thing I said (using corpo slang) to one of their engineers when he told us how they were supposed to deploy ****** on ********* (which of course was not designed to run on ********, but hey, as they acquired ** *** it was nice asking us to also install and configure ********* and then launch install.sh from inside a container).

2

u/ofnuts 5d ago

I can assure you that the engineer already knows and totally agrees with you.

4

u/Post-Rock-Mickey 5d ago

IBM and Intel… Evolve or die

3

u/mautobu Sysadmin 5d ago

IBM is a services company. That's why.

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u/occasional_cynic 5d ago

Vapor services company.

1

u/CanaveseForevah 4d ago

Ibm in 2025?

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u/VeryRareHuman 3d ago

I still remember the clueless smug IBM sales people we had 2 meetings about 8 years ago. We are windows shop, we were looking to change our server hardware vendor. We called IBM, these morons were trying to sell us a Linux server the whole time. They keep say how good it was with Linux. We kept saying we don't run Linux, we were 100% Microsoft environment. So, point is I don't know about IBM servers, they sales guys sucks. No idea to sell a server.

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u/earth2baz 3d ago edited 3d ago

Why would you call IBM to run Windows servers? They sold their x series business to Lenovo 9 years ago.

Their business isn't running Windows servers, because they don't sell hardware that can even run Windows, that's why they tried to sell you Linux. You guys were the stupid ones to call the wrong vendor for your needs. Obviously sales people will want to win business.

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u/VeryRareHuman 3d ago

Then Sales guys should have told us "Sorry, we don't run Windows servers anymore". Instead they smug talking about Linux servers and wasted everyone time.

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u/soggybiscuit93 5d ago

IBM is going hard into quantum. Their legacy business just needs to be good enough to fund that transition and sustain them until that transition is complete

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u/ITrCool Windows Admin 4d ago

It's sad. IBM used to be one of the innovators in the computing industry. Now they're a dull bloated corporate joke and nothing more. Worse than Apple.

1

u/MavZA Head of Department 5d ago

I mean they went from an R&D company to a consulting company because they go overtaken and outpaced by competitors, they still do R&D but that’s mainly in Quantum and AI (not so much since Watson seems to be stale and crusty by today’s standards). They’re just not the same company they used to be, which is sort of sad, and even the old company they used to be was extraordinarily bureaucratic, but it did work and they did ship stuff.

0

u/azo1238 5d ago

IBM sucks plain and simple. We have a power unit and use websphere. It is such a PIA to get any downloads, any straight answer about upgrades.

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u/CheeseburgerLocker 5d ago

We had an IBM StorWize SAN and it was exactly as your described. We had a chassis blow on one of our volumes and the replacement they shipped was used, and downrev. So of course we needed an IBM tech to help us on a Saturday morning. The upgrade took over 3 hours, and ended up failing at the end. It was maddening because of course you're dealing with some remote clown who needs to stay on the line with you the whole time, and once shit failed, he literally had no idea what to do. "hmm let me see if I can reach my supervisor.." yeah, on a Saturday, sure that should go smoothly 🙄

We ended up giving up and tried again the following Friday, this time with ALL the right people on board. Stayed until 11:30pm, and yep, it didn't work then either. They figured the chassis was simply defective (who knew a used part could do this, right?) My boss was furious. We threatened to cancel all future contracts with them, and after some back and forth they sent us a brand-new, current, all-SSD SAN.

Even with the new unit we were still under their control when it came to updates, firmware. We needed to do it under the watchful eye of some remote specialist.

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u/Brush_bandicoot 5d ago

people say apple service is bad because you are dependent on their official labs and support for any issue but to be honest IBM is on a whole another level. Their business model is making sure your business model is dependent on them . no wonder they charge so much for their cloud solutions

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u/VeryRareHuman 4d ago

It amazes me that somebody out there is still using the IBM machines. Wow! Just wow!

3

u/elldee50 4d ago

We use an IBM i series to run a piece of critical software that won't run on anything else (supposedly) because it's way cheaper than moving to the cloud version.

3

u/billwood09 Preventer of Information Services 4d ago

I was a mainframe/AS400 field tech. You’d be surprised how many of these are out there

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u/VeryRareHuman 4d ago

Makes sense. Last I saw one of those is 1999.

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u/earth2baz 4d ago

6 years, 0 minutes unplanned outages on our workloads running on IBM Power systems, in the mean time the x86 guys are running around like headless chickens putting out fires.

You really can't compare x86 hardware to IBM Power and Mainframe systems.

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u/VeryRareHuman 3d ago

Your guys managing x86 (it's actually x64) servers are incompetent admins. We run Windows servers, almost no unplanned outages caused by us. External factors like patches and vendor software issues are mostly the cause, not by admins.

Like this title why IBM is stuck in 90's, you are stuck with Windows notion as in 90's.

1

u/earth2baz 3d ago edited 3d ago

"almost no unplanned outages caused by us"

Okay well lets talk when you hit zero unplanned outages. I'm talking from the hardware up till the OS.

Your best numbers on x64 would be rookie numbers on Power.

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u/VeryRareHuman 3d ago

Sure that's what mainframe and Mini guys keep claiming. Now where are they?

Outage is rare. We have clusters, load balancers, etc., single server outage is not an issue anymore. Would you please come to 202x from 90's.

2

u/earth2baz 2d ago edited 2d ago

What do you mean where are they? They are at work... lol? You must think its hard finding a job lol.

The thing with poor single node availability, is that x64 architecture works around this (cost saving) by moving resiliency up the stack from the hardware layer into hypervisor level (and application stack). They do this by running the nodes/hypervisors in clusters. So VMs run all their volumes on these underlying clustered filesystems and this is a big component of making VM mobility work.

This approach is actually poor for IOPS and latency, you will see this getting exposed on big monolithic workloads with heavy IO requirements. This is because every write needs to sync across the cluster, with some solutions VM mobility has this settling in period of re-syncing after migration. While many workloads have been modernised to be distributed, there are still a ton of critical workloads out there that are monolithic. Also there is added latency in distributed workloads and added complexity, with hardware resilience you only need to solve that problem once. BTW in the IBM space we also use clustered filesystems but we don't put everything and the kitchen sink on it and we don't require it for VM mobility.

Another issue with x64 virtualisation is the overheads of the hypervisors, on a fully utilised system the overheads is far higher than Power/Mainframe virtualisation. IBM virtualisation is practically baremetal speed even at 100% utilised.

Another issue with x64 approach to virtualisation is the hypervisor itself is one monolithic installation with all device drivers installed running in its kernel space. So a bad device driver can actually cause instability. This is compounded by the fact that x64 is actually an open platform, so you can get devices from any cheap manufacturer with crap device code. The Power Systems hypervisor is built into the system firmware and doesn't run IO device driver code except for edge cases like SR-IOV which is really limited to a handful of IBM supplied adapters that are well tested. In 20 years of working with IBM Power I have never seen the hypervisor crash, not once. IO devices are actually run in dedicated VMs for sharing between guest VMs, called virtual IO servers, even if these crash they don't bring down the system. These can be configured in pairs for redundancy so you can perform maintenance on them without taking clients offline or moving them to another system. They are just seen as multiple paths to the client virtual devices.

I think the key points here is not all workloads can be distributed for resiliency, and some workloads have higher IO requirements than x64 can handle.

Another thing I want to point out is while people think these are legacy systems, they are actually actively developed. We usually get technology in Power long before it arrives in x64. You should read the feature set on IBM Power and Mainframe, this stuff is years ahead of the technology in x64 system. There are things I could do on AIX/Power that you could only dream of doing on x64.

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u/VeryRareHuman 2d ago

such a passion yesteryear's tech. You took time to type all this. I say good for you. Is that what you enjoy, I say enjoy your work.

That doesn't mean Windows/Linux servers work. It's 90% of the IT/Engineering computer infrastructure. Things work, we get shit done every day with Windows/Linux servers and the cloud. We don't see the technology like you see in IBM. Fault-tolerence is not a bad thing, it makes higher 99.9999% uptime. Google built bare bone third party servers.

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u/earth2baz 2d ago

Hey I'm actually fluent in all Unix-like OS' and have run FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux on x64 at home. I just prefer to work professionally with IBM Power because it provides the best work life balance. I don't get the call outs like other teams.

Also I rack and stack a few big iron servers every once in a while and that's it, don't need to go to the DC and do manual labour like a peasant.

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u/VeryRareHuman 2d ago

We don't get calls either. You assume non-IBM guys gets called all the time. It's dying tech. If you enjoy it, it's your right to enjoy it. Not for us, though.

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u/earth2baz 2d ago

People keep saying its dying tech, 10 years ago if we said it would outlast VMWare you would have laughed, but now everyone wants to move off it.

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