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IBM has been banned from our data center for several years. The decision was before my time, but the answer I've been told is overly expensive, unreliable, and poor support when compared to other vendors.

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In my experience, IBM’s support is excellent, bordering on fanatical. It’s just that their hardware (in this case, Spectrum Scale and Power9) are preposterously overpriced. Same for their software, if not more so.

As a former IBMer I really like the POWER hardware. It is just a shame that it is made by IBM. Like you said IBM stuff is just too damn expensive.

Right, I should have pointed that out: the Power hardware is truly incredible, especially the fast I/O to GPUs. There’s a reason why the national labs and Google have gone with that architectue.

I know about it from the Raptor PC team and their Foss compatible microcode. Would you say it holds its own performance/reliablilty wise with competitors?

I think these two statements can be reconciled:

- IBM's hardware support is excellent to the point of being obsessive

- IBM's support for anything that is not a hardware problem would be better-implemented by a 5 year old eating paste

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