> Although the article did have issues, I'm most disconcerted > with some of the bang-per-buck comparisons (one of the > charts showed a mid-range SUN performs at 300% that of the > z/900 at only %18 of the cost... and that was a *mid-range* > SUN!)
He's comparing apples and Brazil nuts. It depends a lot on the application -- there are cases where the Sun is the right answer, many where it's not. You have to profile the application. > If a mid-range SUN is only 18% of the cost of a (slower) mainframe, > it will make selling mainframe Linux (vs. SUN Linux) a lot harder. > Granted, the RAS facilities of the mainframe are nice, but for > 18% of the cost... if you had to, you could buy 3 or 4 SUN boxes, > keeping most of them in the closet as "spares" and still be > cheaper. I would argue that the figures in the article do not include the whole picture. For a *single* application, he may be close. It's when you deploy application n+1 and n+2 that the difference/advantage becomes apparent. He's falling into the usual trap of doing TCOs based only on hardware price -- that isn't the whole story, and he's not including cost of operators, floor space, etc. Our studies indicate that the breakdown for TCO is nominally: 20-23% hw/sw cost 37% people remainder facilities (power, HVAC, floor space, network bandwidth, etc) It's kind of weird that people focus on the smallest portion of the problem while ignoring the other 70+% of the problem... -- db
