>and if you had all of those Office machines as separate images on a giant T-Rex, those IT folks would still have to manually patch each and every image separately, and spend 15 minutes on that.
Actually, much of the updates can be automated on a mainframe with the use of shared disks. We are doing it now. I have an automated update method that I've been using for more than a year that works great. After testing a fix on the test image, it takes me about 10 minutes to route it around to 30 other images. To hear more about it, come see my presentation at SHARE in Washington DC, "Managing a Penguin Farm on the VM Prairie", Thursday 8/14 at 11:00. After the conference, If anyone wants a copy of the presentation, I'll be glad to send one. There is also at least one company, Linuxcare, that sells a product, Levanta, that will manage multiple clones on one mainframe, including cloning, start/stop and automated product installation and updates. "Great Minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Admiral Hyman Rickover Gordon Wolfe, Ph.D. (425)865-5940 VM Enterprise Servers, The Boeing Company > ---------- > From: Tzafrir Cohen > Reply To: Linux on 390 Port > Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 1:42 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Whither consolidation and what then? > > On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:09:46PM -0700, Jim Sibley wrote: > > Alan wrote: > > > > > Its just that PC's are so cheap its > > > easier to use several for a job _IFF_ you can solve > > > the management problem. > > > > That _IFF_ is not only non-trivial technically, but > > also not not-trivial financially! > > > > You but one cheap PC or a hundred cheap PC's, you > > still have a bunch of cheap PC's. > > > > One of my favorite examples is that our company still > > has MS pervasively in the office and once a month we > > get a note from IT security to put on a patch because > > MS did it again. So it takes me 15 minutes, so what? > > Well, with 300,000 in the company, thats 75,000 > > MANHOURS. IT security doesn't care - the manhours > > doesn't come out of its budget! > > And if you had all of those Office machines as separate images on a > giant T-Rex, those IT folks would still have to manually patch each and > every image separately, and spend 15 minutes on that. > > As for "cloning", "patch distribution" etc.: those solutions > are exactly "solutions (?) to the management problem". As you mentioned > in the beginning, just cramming many images on one mainframe won't make > it go away. > > -- > Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ > http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ > >
