On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:38:27AM +0100, Willem Konynenberg wrote: > The one weak point in several of the price comparisons that > I have seen sofar is that they tend to compare > NT on Intel > versus > Linux on S/390 > > which is not quite the same as > Linux on Intel > versus > Linux on S/390 > > Note that NT on Intel quite possibly requires more boxes, > and hence more software licenses and more personel than > Linux on Intel. > Thus, the more interesting comparison to me seems to be > Linux on Intel vs Linux on S/390. > > Unless, of course, the aim is to sell Linux on S/390...
Well, for small numbers of Linux instances, it's a win, certainly, to do it on Intel hardware. On the other hand, by the time you're at a thousand rackmount Intel boxes versus a zSeries capable of hosting 1000 Linux images comfortably (though certainly not with as much CPU per image as the Intel boxes--so obviously this is a solution you'd only want to evaluate for I/O, rather than CPU-bound loads), the hardware cost is more-or-less the same (within a factor of two, let's say--which sounds weaselly, except for the next sentence). At that scale, neither hardware nor software is the major cost of running such an operation: your facilities are. One zSeries box plus attached DASD takes up *much, much* less floor space, power, cooling, and required maintenance personnel than a thousand Intel boxes. Adam
