6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
8:08 p.m.
On 06/09/07, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
No argument there.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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On Thursday 06 September 2007, Liam Proven wrote:
Is it? Even if none of those people access said computer in any way?
I don't know any metric, off the top of my head, that attempts to
measure systems' importance. What matters, what sets prices, is users,
number of processors, number of systems, things like that. This is
what determines sales charts and so on.
Even if you measured the mainframes' /cost/ as an absolute, it would
still be tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of PCs sold.
Take the mainframe away, lots of people would be inconvenienced, yes.
But the same is true of those millions of PCs.
Well, we could compare installs, or we could
compare users. It's up
to you. Either way, I'll warrant that its market share now is
infinitisemal compared to what it once what.
Even if they're shifting a million seats a year, which I really very
much doubt, they're doing so in a market of hundreds of millions of
users a year of other platforms. It's marginal. It may be
high-margin, but it's a tiny drop in a big ocean.
How do you count "number of users" on a payroll system? There's
probably only a couple of users, but it's the number of people who get
paid which matters... All right, up
to a point, yes. I've been watching the progress of
Linux on S/390 and zSeries with some interest. I still don't reckon
it's a very significant market share, and furthermore, every site
running primarily or totally on Linux/390 is a site that's running
less on actual IBM OSs.
Unless they're running the typical Linux/390 environment under zVM.
From what I'm told, this is the most common
arrangement, and lets IBM
still sell large amounts of VM while customers are
running Linux on the
end layer.
Indeed, tho' I don't know a lot about
mainframes, I have a feeling
that most Linux/390 is deployed on z/VM - which is to say, in an LPAR
under VM - rather than under z/OS, which is to say, MVS. Linux is
probably actually displacing MVS - z/OS - rather than helping it.
Yeah, but zVM isn't free any more than zOS is. In effect, "zLinux" is
helping IBM sell zVM. (And, more importantly to IBM, helping to sell
maintenance contracts, and consulting work).