> > I see two problems with this story - one is they > > quoted Phil Payne, whose has some kind of vendetta > > against IBM going. (I suspect he lost money in an > > emulator solution) and two, > His input is pretty small and pretty accurate. Even > for us Mainframe Software costs are hefty...
I think I'd agree in this case. While Phil is often unnecessarily caustic, the emperor's new clothes occasionally ARE invisible, and no one else is willing to stand up and say it. Phil often serves that function. Even with the recent price drops for hardware and software, IBM *is* pricing System z out of the low and midrange market (considering only new equipment). With the loss of the Flex 64-bit capability for general use, and now the loss of the emulated PSI solution (whether or not it violates IBM patents I don't know), there's not a compelling solution commercially available that competes with the more high-end Opteron and Itanium commodity systems. With HP providing VMS on Itanium, there's a serious alternative to z/OS available and viable again, and one that provides a lot more MIPS for a lot fewer dollars with few compromises in security (and a lot easier manageability and serviceability. Any mouth-breather can manage VMS semi-competently -- generations of grad students have proven that over and over. )If HP plays it's cards right, they could take a serious chunk of the small z/OS and VSE markets away from both zSeries and iSeries, without customers sacrificing security and/or reliability. VMS clustering isn't parallel sysplex, but how many sites short of the high-end *need* sysplex? > > Itanium hardware is > > faster and more modern than a mainframe PC, but ... > > it is not running Itanium software, it is emulationg > > the zSeries arch. > How does this make it slower? Another interesting argument. If the basic assumption is that the emulated zArch performance is proportional to the underlying Itanium performance, there's a lot of things that could be compelling here. Certainly Hercules seems to do an awful lot in this area, and the argument for Core Duos and Opterons seems to track Moore's Law closely.
