introducing ibm platform hpc

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IBM Platform HPC

Eliminate Cluster Complexity

Know Your IBM

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IBM Platform HPC Eliminate Cluster Complexity 2

Know Your IBM http://www.ibm.com/partnerworld/knowyouribm

IBM Platform HPC Welcome to the IBM Platform HPC module. In this module you will learn how IBM Platform HPC can help customers to fully harness the power of their cluster in order to optimize application performance. Make sure you navigate through all the screens so that you are able to successfully complete the quiz for this module. To qualify for KYI points or promotions associated with the module you must complete the quiz within three attempts before the deadline. If you do not successfully complete the quiz within three attempts before the deadline then unfortunately you do not qualify for KYI points or promotions associated with the module.




Introduction Technical Computing and High Performance Computing (HPC) refers to applications developed by scientists, engineers and analysts that are compute intensive and/or data intensive, and the computing infrastructure that supports those applications. HPC gives analysts, engineers and scientists the computation resources they need to make better decisions, fuel product innovation, speed research and development, and accelerate time to market. By the end of this module you will be able to: Know IBM Platform HPC

Introduce IBM Platform HPC

Present the benefits of IBM Platform HPC

Describe the offering portfolio and main functionalities

Identify the market, challenges and target customers

Sell IBM Platform HPC

Address customer pain points

Identify the sales process steps

Identify the different sales opportunities

Identify the top challenges to sell IBM Platform HPC

Explain the key competitors and differentiators

Explain how IBM Platform HPC fits into the IBM Technical Computing portfolio




Menu Know IBM Platform HPC Visit this section to know about IBM Platform HPC.

What is cluster complexity?

IBM Platform HPC, eliminate cluster complexity

Customer Acquisition Process: capability vs productivity

Key Benefits of IBM Platform HPC

IBM Technical Computing portfolio: Platform Computing brand

Technical Computing and the HPC market key features Sell IBM Platform HPC Visit this section to learn how to sell IBM Platform HPC.

Sales steps you need to follow

Target Customers for IBM Platform HPC

Know the sales opportunities

Why Should Business Partners Care?

IBM Platform HPC value proposition and customer pain points

Top challenges in Selling IBM Platform HPC

Key Competitors

Platform Computing products: IBM Technical Computing Portfolio

A Sales conversation example

Quiz on Platform HPC

Handle a sales conversation

Conclusion




Know IBM Platform HPC




Know IBM Platform HPC What is cluster complexity? Can you imagine installing, configuring, and managing all of this?

Networking hardware

Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE)

QLogic

Mellanox InfiniBand

Monitoring tools

Memory on a node

CPU load on a node

Logged in users

Processes on a node

Certification and Development tools

Cluster Provisioning

Package

Diskless

Imaged Certification tools

Intel Cluster Checker Development tools

GNU Compilers

GNU Debugger

Applications & Benchmarks

Atlas

blacs

bonnie++

fftw

hdf5

iozone

iperf

hpl/linpack

modules

Netcdf

Scalapack

Stream

Operating systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Scientific Linux

CentOS

Windows HPC Server




Management Workload management Configuration management

Node templates/classes

Cluster file synchronization

Network topology management Power/console management Repository management

Multiple repositories

Repository snapshots

Full dependency checking

Package

Cluster update and Admin

Cluster update

Update via Red Hat Network

Update via Yum

Update individual rpms Cluster administration

ntop for network traffic monitoring

Nagios configured

Nodes in the cluster

Web server

Load average

Logged in users

DNS server status

MySQL server status

NTP daemon status

Node 'PING' status

Root partition disk

SSH daemon

SWAP space

Total processes on node

Email notifications to administrator

Parallel shell and Apache webserver

Parallel shell

pdsh for administering nodes on the cluster

Apache webserver

Manual pages for PCM commands

Documentation for PCM 5

List of installed Kits on the cluster

Message passing libraries Platform MPI

MPICH

MVAPICH

OpenMPI

Intel MPI

The Answer: IBM Platform HPC





IBM Platform HPC, eliminate cluster complexity IBM Platform HPC really is a complete management product designed to deal with Cluster complexity. It includes all the software required to deploy, manage and use an HPC cluster. Platform HPC is clearly a long way ahead of the competition.

TABLE 1

Platform HPC

Windows HPC Server

Altair PBS Works

Bright Cluster Manager

Oracle Grid Engine

MOAB Cluster Suite

Linux Cluster Management

x x

Windows Support

x x ** ** **

Workload driven dynamic OS switch

x x x

Integrated Web Portal

x ** ** ** **

Application integration

x * ** **

One-step install

x ** x

Commercial MPI with optimization

x ** **

3rd Party Management SW Integrations

x **

* Windows only

** Limited functionality




TABLE 2

Platform HPC

Windows HPC Server

Altair PBS Works

Bright Cluster Manager w/openlava

Oracle Grid Engine

MOAB Cluster Suite

Reliable/Scalable resource management

x * x * *

Windows Support

x x ** ** **

Basic Scheduling (fairshare, preemption, backfill etc.)

x x x x x

Advanced scheduling (app profile etc.)

x x ** ** x

Application integration

x * ** **

MPI Integration x ** x ** ** Workload driven OS switch

x x ** x

* Windows only

** Limited functionality





Customer acquisition process: capability vs productivity In many HPC accounts you will see that they will follow a traditional approach to acquiring the resources they need for their cluster. This means buying as many CPUs as budget will allow and choosing free, open source software wherever possible. Deploying IBM Platform HPC means that customers take more of a productivity approach. This means that they are using throughput and utilization as benchmarks of success. Capability Approach Utilization

Extended learning period for users

Invisible cost of delay to productive use and utilization

Extended time to fully operational system

$

It takes a long time to "Sweat the Assets"

Time in months Open source management software Traditional HPC = Capability Approach

Buy as many CPUs as budgets allow

Choose free, open source software wherever possible

Accept ramp-up time to full system availability

Accept ramp-up time to full productive use

Queues used to provide resource allocation

Provide support through use of internal resources

Take ownership for evolving the capability of the system




Productivity Approach Utilization

Faster time to full user productivity

Better throughput and utilization

Faster time to full system readiness

Strong policies drive allocation of resources

"Sweat the Assets" much earlier

Time in months Platform HPC Open source management software IBM Platform HPC= Productivity Approach

Use throughput & utilization as benchmarks of success

Invest in tools to measure & drive throughput & utilization

No ramp-up time to full system availability

No ramp-up time to full productive use by users

Policy driven resource allocation

External 24x7 commercial grade HPC support

Joint ownership for developing & evolving the capability of the system




Result: Lower TCO $120,000 $100,000

Open source cost less, but... $80,000

$60,000 Lost productivity due to integration,

troubleshooting & user learning curve

Increased productivity by reducing integration,

troubleshooting & user learning curve

$40,000

$20,000

Costly to integrate software components

Simple, integrated solution, single installer - reduced setup &

provisioning time $0

Self-assembled Platform HPC Software Cost Operation Cost Setup Cost So the overall result of this productivity approach is lower total cost of ownership. This table depicts a 3-year management software TCO for a 32 node cluster. As you can see from the chart, open source costs less, but is costly to integrate and a lot of productivity is lost due to integration troubleshooting and user learning curve. In comparison, IBM Platform HPC increases productivity by reducing integration, trouble shooting, and user learning curve. It provides a simple integrated solution with a single installer reducing set up and provisioning time. Hidden Costs of Open Source whitepaper


From%20SME/Hidden%20costs.pdf




Key Benefits of IBM Platform HPC IBM Platform Computing develops management software for distributed computing environments. Our solutions deliver key values to Technical Computing customers, including: Efficiency First of all, the client will benefit from faster time to full system readiness because of the ease-of-use capabilities and the simplified deployment and provisioning process. Simplification In addition, the workload management capabilities are provided by the easy-to-use interface and include simplified application integration and monitoring so that users can be productive immediately and reduces the user learning curve. Speed Because IBM Platform HPC is based on IBM Platform LSF, the industry's most powerful workload management engine, your clients will also benefit from improved workload throughput which means that they get to market and get to their solutions faster. Completeness Instead of being a stack of software, Platform HPC includes all the required software components and capabilities between application and OS layers. It is an integrated solution certified with server, storage & interconnects vendors. Customer has one number to call for support.





IBM Technical Computing portfolio: Platform Computing brand IBM Platform Computing's strategy is to focus on providing the best solutions in the following product categories that serve the Technical Computing space: Workload Management

Best-in-class management product for compute and data intensive workloads

Multiple editions with different capabilities

Heterogeneous system, OS and application support

Shorter time to results through improved resource utilization

IBM Platform LSF Family

IBM Platform Symphony Family

Integrated Cluster

Integrated management products for Technical Computing environments

Support small (<32 nodes) to large clusters (1,000s nodes)

Bundle with hardware systems to deliver a complete solution

Shorter time to full system readiness, improved administrator productivity

IBM Platform HPC

IBM Platform Cluster Manager

HPC Cloud Products and Solutions

Targeting key HPC Cloud use cases

o Infrastructure Management o HPC 'In the Cloud' o Self-service HPC

Increased flexibility with shared HPC cloud environments

IBM Platform Cluster Manager - Advanced Edition

IBM Platform LSF/ Symphony based solutions

Watch the videos for more information on IBM Platform Computing: http://www.youtube.com/v/qpFeq356rh0 Video: IBM Platform Computing product tour part 1 Duration: 1.53 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NYQx9DSWc Video: IBM Platform Computing product tour part 2 Duration: 2.44


http://www.youtube.com/v/qpFeq356rh0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NYQx9DSWc




Technical Computing and HPC market key features As we can see today, many mainstream clients are adopting Technical Computing technologies for simulation, computer modeling, and analytics in order to drive business benefits and research innovation. Technical Computing is widely adopted and you will even find sophisticated simulations and modeling in companies that manufacture, for example, potato chips. Aggressive market growth is expected in the upcoming years as more companies adopt technical computing technologies.

Financial Services Faster results for risk management, compliance, investment decisions, liquidity management.

Manufacturing Better product design and higher quality.

Oil and Gas Faster time to results to find reserves and exploit producing reservoirs.

Electronics/Semiconductors

Faster time to market for new designs.

Retail Faster results for product design, PoS analytics, buying decisions.

Life Sciences Faster time to results for key research areas.

Education Faster results and increased sharing for multiple departments.

Government Faster intelligence gathering and insights.





Sales steps you need to follow

Learn to identify the different steps of selling and what it is expected from you at each stage.

Prospecting Your search for (new) customers

Look for opportunities in your existing install base

How to deal with objections and leave the door open for future sales

Introduce yourself, state your purpose, qualify, plan next steps

Finding Customer Pains

Becoming a Sales Consultant

Understand customer needs

Identify problems your products and services can solve

Understand competition

Help your customer understand the business implications of the problem and move from problem awareness to solution commitment

Qualifying the Customer

How to avoid wasting your valuable time in chasing prospects who will never become customers

Make sure the solution solves the customer's problem

Find out if the customer sees the value of your product

Confirm that the customer has the budget to purchase and determine if ready to purchase

Talk to the right person, who can make a buying decision

Closing the sale Basic pointers to winning

Close from the beginning

Recognize when potential customers are ready to buy

Note that free trials often lead directly to sales

Choose from the IBM portfolio of migration or consolidation assessment tools and incentive offerings to open doors with customers and progress deals





Target customers for IBM Platform HPC The present situation of continuous, rapid growth in data to be stored and accessed, CPUs and servers to be managed, together with changing business demands, makes it increasingly difficult for customers to keep up. IBM Platform HPC can help to alleviate many of these problems. But who is it directed at?

Small/Medium Commercial Customers

Small and medium commercial customers in manufacturing, oil/gas, and life sciences. These customers are motivated to move to clusters from their workstations for better application performance and expanded computing capability. They require an extremely easy-to-use cluster management solution, as they may not be familiar with many Linux operating system cluster concepts, or lack HPC expertise.

Particularly IM, Oil & Gas, Life Sciences

Motivated to move to clusters for better application performance

Require an extremely easy-to-use cluster management solution

May not be familiar with many Linux OS cluster concepts (command line)

Higher Education & Research Customers

Higher education and small or medium research customer. These customers are particularly focused on application performance. Often these clusters will serve a variety of research users with various applications that require different environments. These clients in particular require cluster management capabilities, which are critical for provisioning hosts and changing the environment based on user and workload requirements.

Focus on OS environment management and application performance

Serves a variety of research users with various applications that require different OS environments

Require a cluster management capability, which is critical for provisioning hosts and changing the OS environment

Collaboration within internal and external parties





Know the sales opportunities Selling IBM Platform HPC requires an understanding of who may be interested and what their objectives are. We can divide these sales prospects between End Users and IT Organizations.

End Users

For end users, the main objective is focused on gaining competitive advantage by delivering higher quality results faster.

Specific goals arising from this objective are centered around innovation via more advanced research and analysis; accelerating time-to-results; gaining better insights through easy analysis of mountains of data; and easy access to the most advanced IT technologies.

Objective: gain competitive advantage

Innovate with more complex applications / simulations / analytics

Complete more analyses in a shorter period of time

Leverage explosion of data without adding complexity

Add new applications quickly and cost efficiently

Simplify user access to resources and workflow

IT Organizations

For IT organizations, the main objective is to build a viable IT environment that enables end users to achieve their specific goals mentioned earlier.

To meet the needs of the end users as well as those of the entire organization, IT is looking for solutions that reduce and consolidate cluster silos; tools that improve IT infrastructure utilization while reducing CapEx and OpEx, including the cost of power, cooling and real estate expenses; solutions that provide agility and support a heterogeneous computing environment.

Objective: reduce cost while maintaining service

Consolidate cluster silos to meet peak service level requirements

Constrain growth of CapEx and OpEx budgets

Address infrastructure issues - power/cooling, space, etc.

Transition to lower cost resources (x86) and virtualization

Leverage evolving trend toward heterogeneous, multi-core programming models (i.e. GPUs)





Why Should Business Partners Care? As an IBM Business Partner you may ask the question "What's in it for me?" The IBM Platform Computing products can help both end users and IT organizations achieve their respective objectives. Let's take a look at the advantages and added value available to IBM BPs from selling IBM Platform HPC.

HPC market is growing

New opportunities in new & existing accounts

2010 grew by 10%, to reach $9.5 billion

2011 grew by 8.4% to reach $10.3 billion

IDC forecasting ~7% growth over the next 5 years

Increase customer satisfaction

Increase the likelihood of additional purchases

Platform HPC simplifies cluster installation, management & operation

Ease-of-use features improve user productivity

Simplify the management, simplify the sale

Install certified, supported clusters

Simplify deployment, decrease service calls

Deploying certified configurations reduces risk

Customer configured open source imposes a significant support burden on IBM and business partners

Control the deal completely: Hardware + HPC Management





IBM Platform HPC value proposition and customer pain points According to IDC, software is still the key issue in terms of major customer pain points. They say that better management software is needed and that the HPC clusters are still hard to set up and operate. In addition, new buyers in the market require ease-of-everything, particularly those using a Windows workstation. Let's see how IBM Platform HPC can help to alleviate these issues. We need better management software, our HPC cluster is too difficult to set up and operate.

IBM Platform HPC allows users to deploy, manage and use their HPC cluster through a powerful web-based interface that helps them focus on their work rather than on managing infrastructure. In comparison with other cluster management solutions, IBM Platform HPC is a single product that delivers a complete set of management capabilities. All the capabilities are tightly integrated, installed using a single installer and are accessible using a single, unified interface. Platform HPC is also tightly integrated with the application layer. Scripting guidelines and job submission templates for commonly used commercial applications enable easy application integration and ensure that users are immediately productive by simplifying job submission, reducing job setup time and minimizing operation errors.

We need to invest in parallel applications but we are afraid that the added complexity will affect performance.

IBM Platform HPC includes a robust and high performing MPI implementation. IBM Platform MPI provides consistent performance at application run-time, application scaling and helps get parallel applications up and running easier. Platform HPC is built on Platform LSF, industry's most robust, widely adopted workload scheduler, which provides the most comprehensive scheduling capabilities to deliver high utilization and reliability of your IT infrastructure. Our scheduling engine offers greater resource agility which allows IT to maximize the utilization of the system based on end user requirements.





Top challenges in Selling IBM Platform HPC Customers in various markets face common challenges in their data center. Having the right answers to common concerns will help you overcome their objections and move forward toward a solution. We need a simple way to manage a complex cluster.

IBM Platform HPC is easy-to-use, yet comprehensive management software. It includes a rich set of features that empower you to get the most out of your high performance technical computing environment, so that you can focus on running your simulations and analyses, instead of managing your cluster. IBM Platform HPC takes the complexity out of setting up, managing and monitoring a heterogeneous cluster environment, ensuring that it is up and running in hours instead of weeks.

We want to set up a new cluster without having to deal with a large number of separate pieces.

Unlike alternative solutions, IBM Platform HPC is fully tested and certified as a complete management solution. In other words, you can sell a complete reference ecosystem, the leverage is a tight integration between IBM System x, Platform Computing software, and key technology partners such as Intel, Mellanox. Platform HPC also has integrations with many HPC applications. It is a simple integrated solution with a single installer and an easy-to-use interface reducing setup and provisioning time. All of this saves money and simplifies management.

We need an easy-to-use platform for non-technical users. IBM Platform HPC has a powerful intuitive web-based interface for users and administrators for cluster and workload management as well as monitoring and reporting. It is designed to make it easy for you to get the most out of your cluster.

How can we deliver strong performance while making optimal use of our resources?

IBM Platform HPC includes a robust workload scheduling engine, which is based on IBM Platform LSF, a proven, powerful, policy-driven workload management solution for engineering and scientific distributed computing environments. By scheduling workloads intelligently according to policy, Platform HPC improves end user productivity and resource utilization with minimal system administrative effort. It also improves application throughput by scheduling resources based on workload characteristics.

We need to ensure that resources are allocated to the right projects.

By scheduling workloads intelligently according to policy, IBM Platform HPC ensures that users have priority access to their own resources. In addition, HPC




user teams can easily access and share all computing resources, while reducing time between simulation iterations. IBM Platform HPC also provides the ability to schedule workloads for specialized resources such as a graphic processing unit (GPU) or for the Intel Xeon Phi processor. This is a distinct advantage in heterogeneous environments as it means administrators can configure Platform HPC so that only jobs that benefit from running on co-processors are allocated to those resources.

We need accurate reporting of resource utilization for fine tuning and capacity planning.

Platform HPC includes an operational dashboard that provides comprehensive administrative reports - you can make timely decisions and proactively manage compute resources against business demand. By correlating workload information with system load, you can identify and troubleshoot issues with your cluster and jobs. When it's time for capacity planning, you can use the unified web portal to run detailed reports and analyses which quantify user needs and help remove the guess work from capacity expansion.





Key Competitors In order to sell IBM Platform HPC it is important to know how IBM's Platform HPC offering measures up to the competition.

Open Source

The biggest competitor for IBM Platform HPC is open source software. HPC clusters first emerged in universities and research centers which required extra compute power, but had limited budgets. As a result, cluster management, workload management and other software was deployed through open source Linux projects and cost almost nothing. Because open source tools are produced by different organization and no open source project provides a complete, all-in-one product, open source users have to go to as many as ten different projects to obtain the software they need to manage their cluster. They then have to get the software working together.

Strengths Weaknesses Platform HPC Positioning

Low software acquisition cost

Not tied to support contracts

Customer needs to implement & maintain a stack of products

No support

Dependent on bug fixes supplied by the community

Complete, certified & production-ready product

Large, global support organization

Reduced risk and overall total cost ownership

Altair PBS Works

The second competitor noted is Altair Engineering, with their Altair PBS Works product which includes PBS Pro scheduler. Because it was originally developed by NASA, open source PBS has deep root in the HPC community. Altair leveraged this and originally built their business by providing commercial support for PBS. PBS Professional (commonly referred to as PBS Pro) is the commercially available version of PBS, which is developed and sold by Altair Engineering, Inc. It forms the base for PBS Works.

However, PBS Pro is just a scheduler. It lacks the robust cluster provisioning and management capabilities provided by Platform HPC. It also has no MPI for performance optimization and has limited commercial application support. In addition, it has a complicated installation process and lacks the stability of Platform HPC, which will cause challenges for many users.


Mature workload management

Dynamic provisioning with CMU integration

Single web portal

Just a scheduler

Limited cluster provisioning & management and MPI support

Limited app support

Complicated installation

Complete product

Integrated app support

Robust MPI library

Single installer for simplified installation




Bright Cluster Manager

The third competitor here is Bright Cluster Manager. Bright Cluster Manager is positioned as a complete cluster management solution. However, it consists of 3rd party software from different sources which do not work together natively or coherently. In comparison, Platform HPC is one seamless and fully integrated product which is developed and supported by IBM. IBM Platform HPC also provides one unified, web-based interface that can be accessed anywhere. Platform HPC includes all functionality required to deploy, manage and use a cluster including cluster and workload management and Platform MPI for application parallelization.


Well-rounded cluster manager

One-step installation

3rd party SW from different sources

No commercial workload manager

Small organization w/ limited global support

One, fully integrated product

Developed & supported by Platform Computing

Adaptive Computing

Adaptive Computing's MOAB Cluster Suite software was derived from Maui Scheduler, which was developed for HPC market and has a lot of attractive features for HPC users. From a workload scheduling standpoint, MOAB is well respected in the HPC market.

However, MOAB is just a scheduler that requires a resource manager. The bundled resource manager, Torque, is a rebrand of Open PBS, which is not scalable and not robust enough for large scale systems. MOAB has no support from commercial application vendors.


Solid install base in Nat'l Labs & Universities

Windows & Linux support

Advanced parallel job management

Web-based interface

Stack of products that do not natively work together

Plan-based scheduler --only good for small number of large, parallel jobs

No support for commercial apps

Small community = limited best practices

Limited support organization

Complete product

Support for thousands of concurrent users & jobs

Integrated support for commercial apps

Installed in all HPC industries = robust set of best practices

Large global support organization





Platform Computing products: IBM Technical Computing Portfolio With the Platform Computing acquisition, IBM has the breadth of portfolio and depth of skilled resources to help small and mid-size businesses as well as large enterprise clients implement Technical Computing, including Big Data analytics, in an affordable and easy-to-use manner. The Technical Computing Portfolio provides solutions that are Powerful, Comprehensive, Intuitive.

Solutions Integrated Solutions Industry Solutions

Intelligent Cluster

HPC Cloud

Big Data

Software Parallel Environment Runtime

Platform MPI

Parallel Environment Developer

Engineering and Scientific Libraries

Platform Symphony

Platform LSF

Platform Cluster Manager

Platform HPC

GPFS

Platform Application Center

Systems & Storage iDataPlex

Intelligent Cluster

PureFlex

System x & BladeCenter

BG/Q

P7-775

LTO Tape 3592 Automation

DS5000

DS3000

DCS3700





A Sales conversation example IBM and IBM BPs can advise customers in the decision-making process, let's look at how a sales conversation focuses on value propositions. “We are looking to get higher quality results faster while improving the utilization and reducing the operating costs associated with our technical computing environment. Why should we choose IBM Platform HPC?” “Many of our customers ask the same question. In comparison to other cluster

management solutions, IBM Platform HPC is a single product that enables you to fully harness the power of your cluster in order to optimize application performance. All of the capabilities are easily installed, tightly integrated and accessible through a single, unified interface. Do you have experience with technical computing? “

“Yes, we are a research institution, however, we have limited IT resources. Currently, we are not happy with the efficiency of our infrastructure, our application/workload reliability is poor and it's getting difficult to manage our environment. This is causing delays and costing us money.”

“I think IBM Platform HPC is just what you need. Platform HPC provides the most comprehensive management capabilities to deliver high utilization and reliability of IT infrastructure. It makes it easy for you to deploy, manage and use your technical computing cluster while meeting the most demanding requirements for application performance. I think you'll find that it's perfect for you and will reduce delays and save you money. “

“This all sounds fantastic, but we don't have a large IT budget and it is unlikely to grow. As I said before, we don't have specialized staff for technical computing, we would require comprehensive support and it has to be easy to manage.”

“IBM Platform HPC comes with 24x7 commercial grade technical computing support from IBM. Platform HPC increases productivity by reducing integration, troubleshooting, and the user learning curve. It is a simple integrated solution with a single installer and an easy-to-use interface, reducing setup and provisioning time. All of this saves money and simplifies management.”

“It certainly seems worth considering, but there are a number of other options. Do you have any performance figures or case studies that you can show me and we can discuss this with our CIO?”

“Of course, let's organize a follow-up meeting and I'll provide you with some case studies, facts and figures. I'm sure you'll be very impressed. I believe that IBM Platform HPC is the answer to your business needs.”





Quiz on IBM Platform HPC Which of the following are key benefits of IBM Platform HPC? (Select all the correct answers.)

Faster time to full system readiness Reduced user learning curve Improved workload throughput Improved resource utilization

That is correct!

All of the answers are correct when referring to the key benefits of IBM Platform HPC.





Handle a sales conversation Your customer says that he can't see how IBM Platform HPC can claim to reduce costs in comparison to a self-assembled cluster based on open-source software which is free. How would you answer his query?

Despite the many benefits of open-source software, the costs associated with deploying and maintaining open-source software override the extra acquisition costs of IBM Platform HPC when the 3-year TCO is assessed. IBM Platform HPC simplifies cluster installation, management & operation, and ease-of-use features improve user productivity. IBM Platform HPC includes all the software components and capabilities between application OS layers.

That is correct!

Although all of the responses are correct when referring to IBM Platform HPC, only the first response is relevant to the customer's question about overall costs.




Conclusion This is the end of the learning module IBM Platform HPC.

In Know IBM Platform HPC you learned about cluster complexity, how IBM Platform HPC helps to eliminate cluster complexity, the benefits and the solutions portfolio

In Sell IBM Platform HPC you learned about the selling process, target clients, top challenges, competitive differentiators and read examples of sales conversations

To review Learn and Earn deadlines please access the Terms and Conditions located on the Know Your IBM (KYI) site at http://www.ibm.com/partnerworld/knowyouribm. Once you enter the quiz, you will not be able to return to the module so please ensure you have reviewed the entire module in detail. As a Know Your IBM user you have the option to view education modules in numerous languages. Please note that you only get rewarded once for completing each module. Good luck!



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