> [snip] > My original point was you can't compare a single-purpose > box's reliability with that of a mainframe and get a fair > comparison.
You can compare anything you like to anything else. Fairness is not (at least last I looked) considered to be a qualifier in choosing one solution over another. > This is a very narrow point, regardless of what the user > sees and platform costs and whatnot. You're looking at a > wider picture here. That's pretty much the point. Yes, the latest and greatest mainframe technology is phenomenally reliable. No question of that. And if you configure it the right way, you can get very high business availability from a relatively small set of moving parts. That's very cool. A towering achievement in fact. But there are similarly effective solutions that cost considerably less whichever way you slice it. Fairness to one or the other is irrelevant. Unfortunately, in a lot of ways its like Porsche's success in making a silk purse out of the old 911 sow's ear. For you non car nuts, the Porsche has its engine hanging out over the back axle, which causes it to have a high polar moment of inertia, which means that left to its own devices and Newton's laws, its going to have an evil tendency to want to disappear backwards off the road. Ask me how I know... Porsche has tamed that tendency by applying a staggering amount of engineering effort - coincidentally over about the same time as the IBM System/360 has evolved into what we see now. So now Porsche has a rear engined sports car that handles wonderfully, but as anyone who has lusted after one knows, its an awfully expensive way of getting from A to B. Just like the mainframe. CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
