Looking at processor and software costs in isolation doesnt tell the whole
story.
Yes, software cost are a big chunk, but doesnt Microsoft charge like a Rhino
for each Windows licence?
What would you attach your E5-2600 blade to and using what? fibre or ethernet?
whose disk systems? tape for backup?
how resilient is it? how many staff would it take to manage?
The elephant in the room is reliability.
Z/series and associated kit is solid and dependable (baring a few exceptions)
having grown ergonomically over 50 years.
How much down time do you get from windows or Unix farms?
Would you risk running your key billing platform's on flaky kit? you can't send
your bills out you can't get your money in.
Cheap kit is cheap for any number of reasons, but often due to poor quality
components, build processes and quality control as its "working life" is only
expected to be a few years.
Ever been bitten by "Tin whiskers" from lead free solder? or duff capacitors?
I recall an article from IEEE about 20 years ago looking at microsofts Hotmail
service.
Running on 200 quad4 pentiums, 10% were out of action at any given time.
The whole shebang could have run on 3 s390's with far better service to the
customer.
I doubt much has changed.
Z/series has had such nice to have's as GDPS (about 10-15 years) multiple
pathing to devices and system manged storage (25 +).
It's only in the last few years that other platforms have started to catch up
in these area's and their idea of multiple paths is generally 2.
(This is a broad sweep, there may well be kit out there thats all singing and
dancing)
(Ibm I series & P series could be classed as junior mainframes having evolved
from System 34 & 36 (cut down System 360's) and are sloooowly getting Z/series
features.)
Staff costs?
once you've got a Z/series site setup which has skilled support staff (not
including application programmers & developers) you can pretty much expand up
to 10 times the kit and plex's (and probably a lot more) with minor staff
increases if at all.
How many people does it take to manage windows or unix estates ? where i've
worked over the years you are talking 4 or 5 times as many people as mainframe
support staff.
And thats just support.
Once you include the dozens of Android, java & C++ developers and proggies you
are going to need to actually produce something worthwhile, you can only afford
to buy cheap kit!
This is why you need to consider "Total cost of ownership" and it is not solely
limited to financial payback period and capital depreciation write off's; staff
& running costs are often overlooked and reliability freqeuently is.
Well thats my rant over for the moment.
TTFN
Dave
P.S yes, i am quite biased.
>imugz...@gmail.com (Itschak Mugzach) writes:
> So why don't you save the money and run your corporate network from the
> mainframe ;-)
>discussion in linkedin "Enterprise Systems" that 4% of IBM
>revenue is mainframe hardware sales, but mainframe business is 25% of
>total revenue ... for every dollar of hardware, customers are paying
>$5.25 for software, services, and storage.
>http://lnkd.in/mjYX6H
>A maxed out z196 with 80 processors & rating of 50BIPS goes for $28M or
>$560,000/BIPS ... however, on avg. customers are paying total of $175M
>(i.e. 6.25 times the base hardware cost, aka difference between 4% of
>revenue for just hardware, but total of 25% revenue) ... or $3.5M/BIPS
>as I've mentioned several times, by comparison IBM has base list price
>of $1815 for e5-2600 blade rated at 527BIPS or $3.44/BIPS (a factor
>of million times difference).
--
>virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
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