Recently I heard about Power8 platform designed “for Magento”. Obviuosly, somebody from marketing had a great idea to ad the general platform for particular purposes.
Many years ago I had a pleasure to work on the grand predecessors of Power8. We gained additional computing power for our ray tracing test.
At Nortpoint Centuria we’re considering stress tests of S822L compared to HP DL360 Gen9, which is a base for most of the private cloud infrastructures we’re using.
I’ve just finished reading an article at Nextplatform.com where I found some IBM’s claims that S822L comparing to Xeon 2960v3 shows performance advantage (2-3x). On the other hand at blog.xcelerit.com we can find something totally opposite. 🙂
Personally I believe, regardless the processor efficeiency (I can assume it’s similar), the TCO of using Power8 will be much higher.
With Xeon we can easily create staging environment with almost no cost (usins some old machines, using vagrant for developers, etc).
We often handle urgent clients requests, when we need to create medium sized enviromnent with one day notice (yes, we have really good hardware suppliers). With IBM channels quotation with one day notice is a small success 😉 (I really admire the history of IBM and even it’s current produts, but it’s corpo and POWER8s will not be available on brokers market). Also, when we have any harddware malfunction we can easily buy new part directly from Intel and it’s gonna work).
To sum up, I expect the TCO of POWER8 comparing to Intel will be much higher, but I’ll examine POWER8s as an option.