Vikings' upcoming OpenPOWER retail channel

Many Talospace readers are familiar with Vikings, who offer libre hosting as well as hardware sales for libre-friendly devices and systems and peripherals certified by the FSF Respects Your Freedom program (for which Raptor systems qualify). However, the Vikings' storefront now shows a new tab for OpenPOWER hardware, hopefully a public demonstration of a new retail channel coming soon for those ready to pull the trigger on an OpenPOWER workstation or server of your own. This is particularly of value to our readers outside North America, since this gets around a lot of the inconveniences of shipping and payment with United States businesses; Vikings is based in Germany, and accepts payments in euros, US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars and New Zealand dollars. Already we have also heard that Vikings is working on a water-cooler system for POWER systems with an aim to reach the market in two months or less, a great option for people trying to run the 18 and 22-core parts in desktop environments (current BTO cooling options are air-cooled only).

Currently it is not known yet whether Vikings will sell full systems, parts and/or processors, whether the systems include other OpenPOWER systems other than Raptor workstations and servers, or when general availability is expected. Still, the more retail options there are, the greater the volume of sales and the greater the economies of scale that will result. In the end, that can only be a good thing for growing our niche but very important market.