As pointed out by many, hardware is the smallest cost in all of this. Also, you need to consider software costs. IF the application software isn't free, multiple boxes are a negative. Consider that Websphere is about $20K per engine. DB2/UDB is also around $20K per engine. Now 4 Sun boxes times ($20K Websphere plus $20K DB2) is $160,000 vs a single copy of each for a single engine S/390 ($40K).
Add in test systems, development systems, spares, how to backup these systems. Consider that people using these other platforms get real concerned with 30-40% utilitization and want to replace everything. It seems that everytime there is a new "required" release of the software, they seem to always require new hardware. All of this costs a lot of money. It seems there are many performance concerns with Linux/390. A lot of them seem to being worked on. (Linux was conceived with the thought of dedicated resources. Linux is being worked on to behave in a shared resource environment.) Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting David Boyes wrote: > > 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
