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.
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.