> David, I disagree with your characterization that IBM's certified mainframe development > platform costs a "goodly sum a pop". The guy asking the question is the VP Engineering > of Sendmail.com, and if his company produces offerings for zSeries, which I believe they > do, then they are eligible for a low-cost offering from IBM's Partnerworld program. > That program can provide the guy with a Linux-based Thinkpad (2Ghz, 60gig drive, 1 gig > RAM), Flex-ES, 3 years of Flex-ES maintenance, loan of z/VM AD-CD's, fully integrated > and ready to IPL, all for around $13,000.
I am aware of the PID discount. I am also aware that the solution you propose does not work well in a data center environment (ever tried to reliably rack a Thinkpad? not easy), and that for me, the equivalent Hercules environment (minus the ADCD CDs, which I can't license) costs me the price of a 80 gig disk, which at the local discount outlet amounts to about $115 plus tax, about $300 if I go super-duper Ultra160 SCSI. If IBM were to offer a single-user hobbyist license for the ADCDs in the $2K to 3K range, controlling the use via T&Cs, then developing for S/390 starts to look like a reasonable proposition to Joe Average Developer -- at that rate, it's in the ballpark of buying this week's MS Visual Whatsis per seat, and everybody's legal and above-board. For that price, I'll buy multiple copies of the ADCD for developers and we're set. I have nothing against FlexES or the other environments, however $13K is not trivial money, not everyone can or wants to meet the PID requirements, and I've already got plenty of hardware that is rack-friendly and fully integrated (and even has a nice blue IBM logo on it). When pricing a sample system from other vendors using a similar solution to the one you described (without the benefits of the PID program), you're talking about 45-70K for a useful rack-mounted development system. Not cheap -- at that point, we're into the used MP3K range. So, yes, it's a "goodly sum" -- that's not negative, it's a plain observation that it's not something available to everyone's budget. -- db
