> > IBM has a good reputation on Power and zSeries (not good for > CPU-intensive work, but disk I/O is in gigabytes/sec). The Power 4+ CPUs are quite powerful. A 4-way IBM pSeries 1.9Ghz outperformed a HP 4 way Opteron 2.4Ghz running a specific computationally intense Oracle pl/sql workload we benchmarked at work. The IBM was running AIX 5.3L, the Opteron RHEL 3 x86_64, both machines had at least 8GB ram (and weren't at all ram constrained). (RHEL 4 on the same Opteron configuration was slower!). Both systems were using 3 seperate 4 spindle raid10 on fiberchannel for the oracle tablespaces, the disk IO rates was quite high, almost exclusively writes, and not even close to a constraining factor.