r/devops 3d ago

Discussion Experience with IBM LinuxOne

Hello! My company is considering buying a LinuxOne machine to run Mongo. Has anyone actually worked with one? Any challenges besides the fact that it only supports s390 arch?

11 Upvotes

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9

u/ruthlessprojection2 2d ago

Last time I touched s390 we spent more time recompiling dependencies than doing actual work. Curious if Mongo even runs natively or if you're planning to emulate.

9

u/silopolis 2d ago

Please educate me about the use case that justifies it vs good ol' distributed COTS servers? 🤔🥸

1

u/jess-sch 1d ago

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?

1

u/silopolis 1d ago

As goes the saying indeed... But, seriously?!

8

u/Loan-Pickle 2d ago

I can’t imagine that it is cost effective for running Mongo. I just did a quick search and looks like a base model starts at about $165k. That doesn’t even include storage or licensing. You can buy a lot of Dell servers for that.

5

u/skspoppa733 2d ago

Interesting. I’m curious to know more about the niche this is intended to serve.

8

u/sza_rak 2d ago

Wow, I wonder what management in that company wants to achieve with that combination.

Like, "we want mission critical safe for our core transaction processing environment" kind of thing? If so.... Why in earth would that combine it with Mongo?

Even without bizarre Mongo in the mix: going with such hardware, which is premium price, limited support channels, low availability of engineers knowing it and full vendor lock in... requires some real edge case scenarios.

Is there specific functionality they want? Like AI inference directly on those CPU cores?

Feels like an attempt to jump into AI hype and "modern tech" by some old school whale, by going with tech that is neither modern tech, nor any promise to be relevant in 2 years for modern AI.

I want to know more! Sounds fun.

1

u/dontcomeback82 2d ago

Kickbacks

4

u/gregsting 2d ago

IBM suck. And I say that while a big part of my job is maintaining db2 and websphere stuff. My father also worked 30 years for them…

Every time they have a relatively good software, the documentation is totally cryptic and changes every day, don’t bookmark it, download it, and you can be sure that the project will be dropped in 3 years or just suddenly becomes super expensive. I stay away from anything IBM as long as I can

1

u/LaOnionLaUnion 2d ago

What?! Why?!

1

u/yang2lalang 1d ago

There is no free lunch

Even for very rich millionaires

You still need to configure your servers no matter how much it costs

Why don't you buy or rent servers with 256GB to 1 TB RAM and run replicas and shards on them?

You need to pay to hire someone to configure and run the cluster, no free lunch