9 Apr
2013
9 Apr
'13
12:13 a.m.
On 8-apr-2013 23:42, Dave wrote:
I do hate answering the obvious trolling, but I am
weak willed so
some answers in lin
You thought by calling me names (e.g. "troll") I'd 'back down'?
What kind of logic is behind that? You only make me more 'eager'
to inquire and get to the bottom of this.
Note that I was never 'trolling', just critically interested in what
this "z" stuff entails nowadays and cross-referencing articles of
well-known publications (like The Register).
So far, no refutations, just name-calling. Well, a bit of something
vaguely resembling a /discussion/ is slowly returning. So, I guess
that's a good sign and it's not all lost yet.
(By the way, are you the same 'Dave'?)
They are big and expensive and difficult to justify
for a small
business? Even with "Capacity on Demand" the entry level prices are
such that an SME (google for what percentage of the market are SME)
can't afford to get on the ladder. There is a lot more to VMWare (and
Hyper-V) than just Virtualization...
I've seen smaller form factor IBM mainframes before, like recently
in a YouTube video.
Also, whatever prevented IBM from creating more and even more
compact mainframes? Like I asked before: What the hell is it
with this disturbing 'elitism', 'mainframe royalty'? That of
all people, the most republican bunch on this planet (Americans)
are defending this goes beyond me...
I can't possibly comment...
... but others say VMWare is getting expensive compared to the Microsoft
Hyper-V.
Could be, but it's hard to deny that they're very proliferated.
(And no, I don't 'love' or even prefer any of the above. This
is just, again, an observation.)
No one outside IBM knows for sure. Getting figures for
how many
zSeries boxes in use is pretty challenging..
HP does the same for some of its product lines (or, actually, those
that they inherited from Compaq and DEC in turn) and people are
equally critical about that practice.
Why do many IBM and particularly "i" and "z" people lack this
(self-)critical ability? Also, wouldn't it be in their interest
if they and future potential users got better access to it and
the platform became a bit more 'common'?
I don't remember it being hard to obtain. I think
the "overpriced"
argument only appeared when they produced the cheaper "windows only"
servers.
Well, for those it naturally applied even more so.
But, also for the AlphaServer/AlphaStation systems though. Just
take a look on comp.os.vms, or its archives, for instance. Or,
look at the current market in Alpha parts (with regard to my
remark about "still").
Poor software library was also an issue, so whilst you
could get the
Microsoft Exchange server on Alpha, you need an Intel box to run the
Lotus Notes and Profs/SNADS connectors.
That was a huge problem, but even more so for the failed attempts at
workstations... Only some high-end 3D software made it to it, not
typically the most profitable, high-volume, stuff. In fact, many
of those programs back then were also optimized for people going
cheap on graphics accelerators and --- from what I understood ---
many NT AXP systems in that line of work ended up as 'render nodes'
... since, after all, the processor itself was still very capable
and impressive.
Sorry it was a survey of our internal sever estate, so
its not available
on the public domain.
Unfortunate, not to mention very convenient for those interested in
the outside world...
Watching VMWare VMotion a VM between two ESX hosts is
still something I
find difficult to believe, but the system does it all the time, to load
balance. It will also do dynamic power management where it automatically
consolidates the work load during times of low capacity demand. (I
haven't tried that yet)
That's interesting, sure, but it's also very boring at the same time
if you ask me.
The magic of computing is largely gone nowadays, lost in the
abstraction layers within abstraction layers (as Dr. Bernd Ulmann
put it once).
Last time I looked IBM was promising this for a future
release of zVM
but it may be here now. Of course IBM boxes are big enough that they
don't need it for performance and there is enough redundancy in a big
box for most needs..
That's interesting. Still a shame IBM allowed it to lag behind.
What will happen if IBM would hypothetically disappear? You
think I'm 'trolling'? You're dead wrong. (But it's too bad I
had to spell it out.)
I'm critical, because I am concerned about the growing x86 &
ARM bi-polarity. There is nothing both those two, it seems,
nowadays.
HP is only keeping up appearances with its IA-64 offerings, just
to annoy Oracle and that's about it, it seems. I doubt Oracle
in turn would keep the SPARC stuff alive much longer either,
they seem /content/ with their x86 things.
So, that leaves IBM as the last big non-x86/non-ARM player,
wouldn't it?
- MG