Shmuel Metz writes: >It was dereliction of duty to not report prices on, e.g., the P390, >MP2000, MP3000.
Duty? I'm just a guy with ibm.com in my e-mail address. Nothing in my job description requires me to hang out here. It's just for fun. And I definitely speak my own personal opinions. I Googled the Multiprise 3000 and found a press article from 1999 concerning the price of a Multiprise 3000. Within the context of a developer offering (ADS), not full commercial terms, the MP3000 was listed as $170,000 for the H30 model, U.S. 1999 dollars. Now, that had a very little bit of internal storage it's worth noting, so that's something to take into consideration. But external storage is a lot lower priced now. So it looks like a new z9 BC has a much lower price net, and it's certainly a fantastically better machine. I haven't found a price for the Multiprise 2000 on Google, but I have found statements that say the MP3000 both improved the price/performance and carried the same price for the H30 as the smallest MP2000. Except I don't think the MP2000 had internal storage. Anyway, it appears the hardware was more expensive (on net), plus more expensive dollars, than the MP3000. Somebody please check me on that. I haven't found P390 (System/390 Integrated Server) prices, so somebody will have to help us on that. The P390 had some shortcomings even as a software development platform, though. I wish it had more memory expansion, in particular, because there was development stuff you just couldn't do in 128 or, later, 256 MB physical memory. Lack of z/Architecture aside, would DB2 V8 or V9 load? (Anybody tried V8 or V9 on a teeny LPAR like that?) For comparison, according to a recent post on IBM-MAIN a z800 at ~40 MIPS hardware capacity is priced at about $30,000 on the secondary market, U.S. 2007 dollars. That's without storage, it's fair to point out. I detailed the total acquisition and licensing prices of a commercial z800 installation, with z/OS.e, WAS, and C/C++, on a recent Mainframe Blog post and estimated about $50,000 U.S. all-in/1st year for the smallest configuration. z/OS.e is well under $200 per month by my calculation. The zNALC offering is even more attractive and would clear the way to COBOL or PL/I in many circumstances, and certainly developer software licensing is possible if you qualify. DB2 z/OS is a major commitment: I think it's about $4,500 per month at 3 MSUs for commercial licensing. I didn't check CICS or IMS. Your mileage may vary. There are lots of permutations here depending on what you want. I wanted a Java plus C/C++ environment with WAS as my transaction manager and VSAM as my data store, so that's what I configured. Somebody might have a business opportunity here for developers, especially if the Dallas offerings have a problem. The z800 supports, what, 15 LPARs? z/VM is also an option of course (at $22,500 U.S. 2007 price for a one CP license last I checked). I've been half joking for a while now that I could go into the mainframe hosting business without much money. I don't mean to be flip, but really, honestly, there's a lot of mythology circulating. I agree with the sentiment that I think Bob expressed: if IBM's doing something wrong, go get the facts and then work the problem. But claiming a z9 BC has a higher price and doesn't scale down as well as a MP3000 isn't the place to start, because I'm not going to be the only one who pulls out the prices and capacities and says, "Huh?" IBM has taken at least 20 actions in the past few years to address better the small scale mainframe customer's needs. Lord knows IBM is not perfect, and I totally agree there's more to be done. However, let's start with what has been improved and build on that. For example, could IBM do a better job organizing and offering "developer consortium" pricing? Is that something that would help? Is the cute little DS6000 enough, or should IBM have a model with internal storage? One possible problem with internal storage is that it could put the storage on the same technology refresh cycle as the CPU. And that hasn't worked very well in the past because spindle technology has moved too fast, so it could taint the whole CPU box and shorten its useful life, especially for software developers. Lately there's some evidence that spindles may be going away. Samsung just announced a 64 GB flash memory "hard drive," I believe, which fits into a notebook computer in a 2.5 inch form factor. It might be a little while before flash achieves the rewrite cycles needed for enterprise storage, but that's a possible future. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
