Norman Hollander writes: >Specialty Engines don't exist for performance reasons. They exist >to defer General Purpose Engine upgrades which WILL increase >software licensing charges.
First of all, general purpose engine upgrades don't increase software licensing charges unless you're talking about software licenses tied to machine capacity (i.e. full capacity licensing). You can add as many CPs as you want, but what you pay for sub-capacity licensed software depends on whether you use the CP capacity or not (and on a sustained basis, i.e. peak four hour rolling average). I'm not trying to be pedantic. It's a very important distinction. Moreover, if you're also upgrading models, that could lower your software charges. And software licensing charges better not be the sole criterion for your business's success or failure, otherwise you're really in trouble. (Some businesses are!) Software you license is software you don't have to write yourself (or software that would otherwise be unwritten or un-run). And spending more on such software is often the best idea in the world, because it means (for example) you've eliminated a paper-based process that's costing your business an incredible fortune every month, not to mention lost marketshare. Software is great stuff, and I buy and use a lot of it because it helps me get my job done better. And every computer would be an expensive doorstop without good software. Anyway, with all that out of the way, in the engineering sense I suppose you could argue that specialty engines do not provide "performance," as long as you're also willing to argue that additional CPs don't provide performance either. However, in the real world, I think they do: or at least price-performance. That's because you've implicitly assumed equal response time service delivery pre- and post-specialty engine installation. To the end user, at least, the specialty engine provides "performance" because their response times improve as they get more CPU resource for their particular workloads, post-speciality engine. I've heard people argue that speciality engines are not "accelerators," so don't use that word. Well, OK, in the pure engineering sense maybe they have a point. But how about the end user's point of view? She gets better response time because her workload has less contention and more capacity available. Her work is accelerated. So if end users (among others) want to use words like "performance" and "accelerator" to describe speciality engines, why not? It works for me, and I'm not going to be so pedantic about that. Speaking only for myself, as always. - - - - - Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect STG Value Creation & Complex Deals Team IBM Growth Markets (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
