One point I'd like to highlight is that a zBX is *not* simply another blade server chassis. One of the key reasons it's not the same is the zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager (URM). For example, URM is able to coordinate resource allocations and provisioning dynamically across multiple operating systems, in effect extending some of z/OS's Workload Manager (WLM) capabilities out into the blades. That's unique. More information available here:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/zenterprise/unifiedresourcemanager.html Another point... Yes, you *could* replicate some of the functions of a zBX by building something else out of various parts. In practice, that's hard. (George highlighted a common problem among many: networking run amok.) In principle you could also write and maintain your own operating systems, relational databases, transaction managers, service management tools, etc., but in practice you'd probably do it rather badly, and it would necessarily require more labor than buying something complete and ready-to-go. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
