I wonder if POWER8 based servers will be available for the mass market? I'm not sure whether Google is interested in commoditizing POWER8 servers or just participates in the OpenPOWER foundation to ensure that POWER-based servers will suit their needs. The fact that Google is open about their new motherboard hints at the former, but it's not much.
I wonder how non-Google-scale developer could even potentially get to use POWER-based servers. Will they be available from the regular dedicated server hosting companies? What OS could they run? RHEL does support POWER platform, but for a hefty price: https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/ CentOS doesn't, presumably because all the POWER hardware CentOS developers could get is either very expensive or esoteric. That likely means I don't have to consider using POWER-based servers for at least 3 years, right?
Since POWER8 is little endian now it's pretty easy to get things running on it. We had Ubuntu ported in one cycle and 14.04 runs sweet on POWER8. All the compilers and the entire toolchain is ready to go. Everything in the archive works, just apt-get install.
All of your Linux workloads will probably just work on a POWER8 server. I started working on this server about a month ago, and have never used power-anything before. I just ssh'ed in did my work, and unless I did a uname or noticed the URLs with the arch in them when upgrading, it acts just like my Ubuntu x86 machines.
Yesterday at IBM Impact we deployed SugarCRM /w MariaDB and Memcached, a Websphere petstore, and Hadoop (using IBM's Java), all at once from zero to fully deployed and serving in _173 seconds_. These machines are _fast_.
Disclaimer: I work at Canonical and helped run the demo backstage during the POWER announcement.
Wow, thanks! It's great to hear the information first-hand from someone "in the trenches". So, I guess, Ubuntu 14.04 is running, but it's due to some kind of "last moment" special porting effort by IBM, not an official version from Canonical? Or else, why isn't POWER support mentioned anywhere on Ubuntu's website? http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
Not last minute, we've been working with IBM on this as part of 14.04. It's officially a supported platform for 5 years, here are the ISOs, you'll be able to get support for the entire thing from IBM and Canonical:
When the machines start shipping in real life (I think they said June?) it'll be more obvious on the main site.
All the surrounding ecosystem bits around Ubuntu will also get POWER8 support, so PPAs will start building POWER8 binaries, and all of the deployable services available on jujucharms.com will be available as well.
I can't stand it how their 'buy now' link for a product with a listed price then links to a 'get a quote' form. If they didn't do stuff like that I might have bought one of their machines instead of the HP that is currently churning away happily (32 cores, 192G of RAM, quite the little beast).
I wonder how non-Google-scale developer could even potentially get to use POWER-based servers. Will they be available from the regular dedicated server hosting companies? What OS could they run? RHEL does support POWER platform, but for a hefty price: https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/ CentOS doesn't, presumably because all the POWER hardware CentOS developers could get is either very expensive or esoteric. That likely means I don't have to consider using POWER-based servers for at least 3 years, right?