IBM recently announced RapidBuild, a reseller channel program that enables organizations to adopt trending technologies like cloud, big data and mobility—quickly and efficiently—with the help of global technology integrators. The first IBM partner to enroll in the RapidBuild program is Avnet, whose 261 resellers are now enabled to sell Linux on IBM POWER8-based solutions with EDB Postgres Advanced Server database pre-installed.
No doubt, IBM has its choice of partners to complete entire ecosystems of solutions. In the open source market, that ecosystem must encompass best-of-breed solutions that address the entire software stack. There are at least three key reasons IBM adopted EDB’s open source database management system as part of the software stack it sells its customers:
1. EDB Postgres is compatible with and enables migration from Oracle.
2. According to Gartner1, EDB Postgres Advanced Server delivers savings of up to 80% compared to implementation of proprietary, commercial databases, and Oracle Database Enterprise Edition in particular. This frees up significant cash for investment in strategic initiatives.
3. Speed matters. IBM Power Systems running EDB Postgres Enterprise provides price-performance value that handles the demands of enterprise workloads, helping get the best return on investment. A trusted third-party enterprise verified the performance benefits of running EDB on Linux on Power compared to x86 in a virtualized environment such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In that environment, EDB yielded 2X performance benefits. What does that mean for customers? They can run the same workload with 50% of the CPU resources on Power compared to x86, or run twice the workload on Power compared to x86.2 This is an important development for OLTP-intensive businesses.
For organizations concerned about the high cost of proprietary relational databases, running EDB Postgres on POWER8 is an especially attractive proposition. By helping users experience a level of performance comparable to x86 while using fewer cores, POWER8 allows organizations to save money on the price of per-core EDB Postgres annual subscriptions.
Add this to a server price that is often cheaper than x86 options to begin with, and you get price performance that’s up to 60 percent better. In turn, this allows organizations to further capitalize on the lower total cost of ownership that EnterpriseDB can offer on its own.
By running EDB Postgres on IBM POWER8, organizations can achieve database costs that are up to 80 percent lower than those of proprietary database solutions. In an era when moving funds away from basic maintenance tasks in order to better support innovation is a make-or-break priority, numbers like these are certainly something to get excited about.
For EDB, IBM’s RapidBuild program supports the rapid adoption of EDB Postgres with IBM POWER8 and Avnet. In addition, the partnership provides customers a tuned, configured, single solution developed by trusted ecosystem partners Avnet, EDB, IBM, and Red Hat.
Marc Linster, Ph.D, is Senior Vice President of Products and Services at EnterpriseDB.
1Gartner, The State of Open-Source RDBMSs, 2015, by Feinberg, Donald & Adrian, Merv (published Apr. 21, 2015).
2Results are based on IBM internal testing of single system and OS image running with pgbench work load at scale factor of 1000 and are current as of March 16, 2016. Individual results will vary depending on individual workloads, configurations and conditions. OS and EDB support price is for 1 year duration and Hardware is 3-year standard support. IBM Power System S822LC; 16 cores / 64 threads, POWER8; 3.3 GHz, 128 GB memory, EDB 9.4, RHEL 7.1. Competitive stack: HP Proliant DL380 Gen9; 36 cores / 72 threads; Intel E5-2699 v3; 2.3 GHz; 128 GB memory, EDB 9.4, RHEL 7.1. Both tested configurations represent the highest processor frequency for that specific processor.