I agree with your points! However, at least in my company the definition of "long range planning" is "next year's budget". We literally will NOT sign ANY multi-year contract. Not even if a 3 year contract for product X costs less over those three years than a single year of a competing product Y. Gives you a good idea of management's thoughts on our viability. Note, this applies to all systems: z, Wintel, AIX, Solaris, Linux.
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 10:51 AM, David Devine <david.dev...@sse.com> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
